A Convergence Of Birds Read Online Free PDF

Someday. Something—maybe.
    The Box Artist is the artist of desire. The tenderness of desire that can never be consummated.
    The Box Artist plucks the child’s flying image out of the air as you might pluck a feathery little bird out of the air, a canary or hummingbird, small enough to fit in your closed hand.
    The heavy black box camera grows heated with the effort. The shutter snapping! The mysterious film within, wound past the lens, imprinted with the Blond Child who is oblivious of it. (And yet, afterward I will wonder: Was she aware of me, in fact? Crouched here behind the mesh-wire fence, in a patch of dusty weeds? Was she playing a game, as precocious girl-children do, watching the Box Artist through lowered eyelashes and giving no sign—except a sly little pursing of her lips?)
    Until abruptly the children’s “play” is over. In dispirited columns they shuffle back through the slot of a door. Someone must have called them, or a bell has rung. A matron in a dark coverall appears in the doorway, commanding the children to hurry. How strangely obedient they are, trooping back into the warehouse within, a house of unwanted wares; the emptying playground releases them without resistance. Yet, bravely, the Blond Child continues swinging, pretending not to have heard the summons. She’s flying, kicking, bucking, jets of blue flame leaping from her eyes, more recklessly than ever. The matron shouts at her what sounds like, “You! Get down.” For another few seconds the Blond Child dares disobey, then she too gives in. Like a bird wounded in flight, she returns quickly to earth.
    How forlorn, her abandoned swing.
    The pathos of the vertical, stilled swing.
    Indistinguishable now from the others—how many others, resigned, slump-headed in their faded-blue orphans’ issue—the Blond Child disappears into the red-brick Los Angeles Orphans Home. My fingers continue to snap the camera’s shutter as, after the death of its brain, a body may continue to thrash, to quiver, to pulse for a brief while. But at last I stop. Shaken and exhausted. My soul seems to have drained from me. Quickly, fumbling with my car keys, I prepare to leave; in a sudden terror that the matron has seen me. As in the past, not frequently but sometimes, occasionally, vigilant parties, invariably women, have called the police to report—What? Who? What crime have I committed, with only a camera? The Box Artist is bound by no local law in the execution of his exacting art.
    As I drive away in the 1928 Ford I peer anxiously into the rearview mirror. Seeing only a dust tunnel raised in my wake.
    My defense would be The child knew me, as I knew her.
    For hours that evening, and then for days. In the dank earthen-floored cellar of the bungalow on Sacramento Street, East Los Angeles. A shabby house surrounded by palm trees, crude sword-shaped leaves rustling in the ceaseless maddening wind. The whisperings and murmurings of strangers Look! look! look! look! Look what his life is.
    Yet unhurried, I develop my film, precious to me as my very soul. My pulse quickens as I contemplate the miniature images, I feel almost faint, the Blond Child so captured, so my own. I prepare the Box; the Box I have chosen for her measures approximately thirteen inches by nine by five; an ordinary wooden box you would say, and you’d be correct; stained from use, oil smears in the wood slats; a box scavenged by the sharp-eyed Box Artist out of a mound of trash in a drainage ditch out behind this bungalow. Eagerly then, and in excitement and fear, I select my artifacts. In honor of the Blond Child I must choose well; if I fail, she will be lost a second time.
    This is my body, and this is my blood. Take ye and eat. The secret wish of all who live in their art.
    After several blunders, and sleepless nights, I step back to discover that I have created a Box landscape of uncanny subterranean beauty! Coarse, earthen, primitive; of the rich sepia hue of memory. Tiny