Here I Throw Down My Heart

The Theory of Flight

22 The Theory of Flight for Buddy for over an hour we watched a hummingbird trapped in the arch of a skylight so close it was to life or death or some release from the awful thrumming of wings too weak to fall back into place after each attempt to reach the sky— my neighbors and I each battling what could separate us from the quirks that too quickly snuff lives have gathered to free the bird from the delicate trap of light and man-made sky— we seem clumsy too eager to hold onto the fragile space we think we inhabit we dare not question how each of us knows life is a mere balance of light and the absence of light— and how in our cages of skin 23 we wish we could beat our way heavenward while air traps us all on solid ground while the sky above ever changes its direction— we watch as the bird exhausted falters but never stops and we think of how our bodies have faltered skin turning back to wrinkled cells barely recognizable to those who tend us—and in those moments how easy it seems to be no greater no less than a hummingbird and fly at eighty beats per second toward a sky real or not where nothing flowers nothing soothes the air ...