The Art of Flight
What wings accumulate is not air
but space, an exemplar
of restraint defied. I listen
and hear feathers
ruffling in the shadows,
a vibration that swells
until it becomes flight or
regret, the retrieval of our
bodies from this dream of ascent.
The art of flight is one of
disturbance, of angles and lift
and touching what can’t be seen.
What we hold carries no meaning.
The beauty lies in the gathering.
I wrote this piece in the mid-80s, and posted it here in 2015. I’d forgotten about it, until I found the original moldering in a box of old papers. It’s okay, for an artifact from another life…
O at the Edges 
Each wingbeat a memory on our path to the present.
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It takes more effort to get aloft these days, but once there…
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What I love about your “finds” is that they’re often timeless – and I found myself thinking of this as an ars poetica, the art of flight as the art of poetry. Love it!
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I found a bunch of drafts and fragments of things, most of which were likely abandoned for a reason. LOL. I think this one does work as an ars poetica, though when I wrote it I had no clue what I was doing.
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I can relate!
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From your past, but relevant to a lot of Nows …
“What we hold carries no meaning. / The beauty lies in the gathering.” feels like a universal truth put into plain English.
And perhaps beyond initial gathering, beauty emerges in sorting/thinning of the previously-gathered?
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I like the way you think, Jazz! There’s much beauty to be found in the winnowed remnants of the previously gathered.
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