INTERSECTIONS: Robinson @ Bird Alley

HIS UNOBSTRUCTED VIEW

By Luanne diBernardo

                                                                                                                                    

            From the tilt of his head he could easily see the top of every tree that crowded the back and beyond of his property, were they not, that is, for the most part obscured by a dense grid work of steel, roped cables, and hives of buzzing transformers that out-cried the nearby cicadae. And while his head remained cocked only slightly, it was clear that the man (his arms to his sides and slightly forward), was intending to be looking upward, though barely his head.

            He stood almost center of his backyard lawn, some lucky few blades poking upside his shoe tops. Facing him was an old white garage with two sliding doors, hinged and crisscrossed with black-painted trim. The sky was summery blue. To the left of the man, a narrow garden ribboned alongside a chain link fence that begged you not notice the graveled alley just beyond.

            The man is bald, and his body thick from content and from meals like the one I breathe in as I near his house.  His head is axled back in a way that suggests it has reached its limit, against the odds he might see whatever was worth his pained deliberance.   A young girl at the edge of the skinny garden scoops fistfuls of homemade mud from a silver bucket, drizzles the slop into dung-shaped pies.

            A woman’s voice hums from behind a screened window, impossible to see through the silvered screen, though I try.  It doesn’t occur to me that while impossible for me to see through the screen, it was likely the humming woman could see me. Possible that she had been watching me watch the man and the girl from the start, and that the reason the man couldn’t move his head was something she knew like a secret, something to do with why she hummed.  Possible that the man not being able to glance towards a colorform sky had a thing or two to do with who he became on a day intended like this one.  It’s who he is the instant he wakes, when he dresses, when he walks, when he dreams. It’s who he became and would ever be, and why it mattered enough to crane (or attempt to crane) towards what he had not seen for a very long time.

            Whether I was moving or not, I can’t be sure, when I heard the man groan. The sound from his throat was low and winding, not quite enough to become a word, but enough to know it was good.  My eyes have, by this time, grown accustomed to his shape against a vast backyard Maple, and so how I’m able to witness when the tip of his nose edges upwards from a cluster of leaves, a movement not worth noticing, but the small girl does.  Her hands, though filled with earth’s batter, are stilled for that moment, and her face, it widens, and the woman’s humming slows to a hush, and all because of what he saw.