Wing Beyond the Page

At first light a solitary swallow lands on the sill, turning the pale quiet of dawn into flutter and promise. The room keeps the echo of those wings, urging my pen to wake. I wrote these lines at dawn, while the city still rests in its own dim reflection. Across the street, laundry lifts slightly, surrendering its silence to the light. I sit by the window and listen for flutter inside my skull, those first rustlings that announce a sentence is stirring. If I hurry to trap it, I hear the faint tap of feather on iron. So I wait. I breathe once for the bird, once for the cage, until the tapping calms and the room grows bright enough to show every mote adrift in the beam.

I have learned to respect this hour when language has not yet tightened its net. Yesterday, hurrying, I forced a thought onto the page and watched it shrink, bewildered, pacing in circles no wider than my page. All its wide horizons collapsed into commas. I tore out the leaf and burned it in the stove, hoping the glow might release what ink had confined. The flame rose, brief and clear, then died. The bird did not return.

Perhaps true writing is less capture than companionship. One summer afternoon in the mountains, I followed a swallow across hillside meadows. I did not want to hold it, only to keep it within sight, to match my breathing to the beat of its wings. The bird dipped, climbed, vanished, returned. By evening the word flight held more mysteries than I could speak, yet my body understood them, each muscle carrying an image of sky. That evening I filled pages without effort. Sentences poured as water pours, remembering riverbeds in the earth’s green flesh.

When I grow impatient now, I leave my study and walk the park. Children shout. Acorns tumble. Leaves slide underfoot with a sound like distant applause. I carry no paper. The mind, unburdened, loosens its restraint, thoughts gliding freely above conversation and laughter. By the time I return, the bird settles on my wrist unafraid, and I need only offer the blank page as open field.

We are taught to admire mastery, phrases polished to a mirror’s shine, but mastery is sometimes a brighter cage. The greatest truth resists perfect sentences, it hovers just beyond completion, teasing us onward. Better to risk imperfection than to seal rarer beauty behind gilded bars. Even now, writing this, I notice a tremor at the margin, a whisper that another sky exists beyond the period.

One autumn evening, a friend dying of slow fever asked me to read aloud. I chose no poem, no scripture, only opened the window and let night air enter. We listened to wind move through trees, to distant traffic ebb, to a lone crow passing overhead. After a long while he said, “That is enough.” I understood. Sound itself had carried him where words could not. And I was free, the cage no longer mattered.

So, reader, treat each of my sentences gently. Leave a gap within that silence for the unseen wing. When you sense restlessness on my page, erasures, revisions, arguments with style, step back. Walk until day and thought share the same wide breath. Return only when you hear quiet settling over the ink, as dusk settles over a field after harvest.

Then write not to imprison but to accompany. Let language be perch, not prison. Accept that certain truths will always skim just above the line, never touching down. Their passing shadow is gift enough, and the wind they stir keeps every word alive