Mikarrhea

Take my breath away



Driving home from Richard, my therapist, I was stopped at an intersection (Arsenal & Greenough, if you know the area), listening to loud, loud radio, when I saw a hawk, just extended wings really at first, rise above the shrubbery by the Charles, about 150 yards directly ahead. It ascended at a constant clip straight up into the sky, a red-tail, you could tell by now, arms all out but curving forward, like Superman, or Christ affixed, prone, fetched from on high by a tractor beam (the music loud and fabulous, the chorus arriving, all triumphal chords). Since the song began and I cranked up the volume, I'd been imagining the memorable film montage I'd edit to it one day, a rhythm of devastatingly arty and ironic frames transforming its grandiose cheesiness. For some reason, the hawk-and-chorus conjunction set my whole inside into a meltdown. This was fun. My skin was buzzing. In my stomach I had a feeling of acute plummeting, corresponding nicely with the hawk's levitating. I watched for it to flap its wings. It didn't. Just kept rising. Could've been inflated with helium. Very cool. A couple hundred feet up, apparently in response to a musical cue, it banked left across the sky, radiating the shameless fusion of ecstasy and self-regard you often get in an irritating maestro's largo glove-sweep. I really wanted it to flap its wings, just because . . . well . . . it wasn't fair that it didn't have to. But it wasn't going to. It was all about delay, refusal, tease. I was actually shouting, screaming really, "Omyfuckinggod Omyfuckinggod Nofuckingway!" And laughing. At myself, the levitating hawk on an invisible line, the cheesy song --the whole imbecilic situation.

The light changed, I turned left: following the hawk was on my way. Another light, the hawk way ahead, a half a mile already, incredible shrinking, still unflappable. When it had become a little breve ( ˘ ) in a lot of blue, I saw another red-tail ascending just in front of me (incongruous at this tangled cement juncture of Arsenal St., Market St., Western Ave., & the exit- and entrance-ramps to Soldiers Field Road, a classic fucked-up confusing disaster of a Boston intersection), turning and turning in the proverbial widening gyre, a mode of elevation (if I can wax birdy for just one second) BIZARRE for falcons (I'll be delving into this further in my highly anticipated journal article, "Not on Extended Wings: Egregious Bird Mistakes in Poetry"), but virtually diagnostic of buteos (which is why the less frequent crucifix-in-a-tractor-beam ascent of the first red-tail was so cool). Two hawks soaring to triumphal harmonies! everything tingled.

As I accelerated to the right onto the ersatz expressway Soldier's Field Road becomes here, leaving the new hawk behind, I saw that from far to the left the first one was heading back my way, now in a glide, wings tucked back, scimitar shape. Small still and decendingly rapid, it disappeared behind some annoyingly looming buildings along the left. I stomped the accelerator to pass the obstruction and reconnect with the hawk as quickly as I could. I yelled to it a bunch of times not to go away, but my windows were shut. The stupid buildings refused to go away and unblock my view of the lefthand sky, even though I was going about seventy and my head was was having the hardest time not using its rest. A quarter of a mile ahead I saw the line of buildings would finally give up, opening up my sky, and just there on the right was an emergency pull-out. This was sort of an emergency. I zoomed into the pull-out, screeched to a halt, and leapt out of my car, this being my story, like Uma Thurman. The Soldiers Field Road cars were roaring by, though seemingly at, me pretty much at the loud speed I had just been going. I scanned the sky across the highway, probably with a curiosity-arousing expression of desperation (oh where could that daughter of mine have flown off to?), and very aware that I looked like an idiot. Why the fuck don't I always carry a shitty pair of binoculars in my car for emergencies? A movement nearer and higher than I expected caught my attention. The red-tail, not twenty feet in the air, was across the way gliding quickly straight in my direction, wings still locked back, but now on a landing trajectory. As it passed directly overhead, where it seemed I could jump up and touch it, it shifted into slow motion, spreading its rust tail, then flashed in a blink into the riverside greenery again. I'd be willing to testify in court I never saw it flap its wings at all. In addition to the tingling, I was jealous.

What was the song? This is really the whole point here. It's very, very, very, very humiliating. "Africa," by Toto.

I got back into the car and drove off to Jessica Simpson singing "Take My Breath Away."

I really despise Jessica Simpson.