Drawing Circles with Time

Abstract

Just before sunset, in early March, it was finally warm enough to go out on my back porch to have a glass of wine before dinner. I opened the storm door and stepped out, the glass cupped in my hand. Across the alley, the flat brick wall of the four-story apartment building, as always, forced my gaze up over the roof, up the chimney to the tip of the aerial, then overhead to the open air. I looked straight up, peering out beneath the brim of my hand into a maelstrom of thousands of wheeling hawks, two hurricanes of black wings, in high, lazy whirlpools, each spinning in absolute silence around an eye of transparent blue; spiraling off in pairs, looping back, interweaving themselves again into the funneled cloud of birds. The topmost pairs, winged specks, suddenly shot golden in the slanting light. Two dense spinning circuses turning inward and outward, throwing off pairs, like duets of skaters spun out of a crowd. Circles turning within circles, like the overlapping gears of a giant clock. One storm spun east, the other slowly west.