Avian Beauty

“Have you ever seen a bird die in mid-flight?”

“I can’t say that I have, no…”

“It’s a little like watching your youth evaporate. Like holding a snowflake as it grows. It’s strangely beautiful in the final moments. A graceful fall. It’s like that bag from that one movie; all empty hope and movement without a thing in it. It was the inspiration for that triptych I did last month—the one where the left panel is all red, the right panel is all yellow, and the middle panel is all orange. My mother said it was my best work yet… she never compliments my work… Maybe she wants me to die, mid-flight… You know, sorta like Marilyn Monroe. I once knew a girl named Norma Jean—talk about having fatalist parents damning you to a life of puppetry only to die mysteriously. She wasn’t very pretty, though, so I guess it doesn’t matter. Sorta like that one beat-poet said, ‘Scat ain’t all. That. Man.’ Truer words have never been spoken…”

“ ‘Holding a snowflake while it grows’?”