Strange Birds

Little yellow feathers tickle her neck like the dark whiskers of her favorite man. The birds have just passed, just an inch away from her creamy white face. She is colored by their streaks of movement, the radiance bursting in the form of softness and quill. They came from the mountaintop, a series of strange birds.
Strange to her.
She clung to her whiskered man like a warm stone in a torrential river of dark fears. They flew like a beaked battalion, large and oversized, small and red. Striped and iridescent. Despite the sweat that rippled down her soft contours, despite her stomach-bound butterflies and startled heart, the birds flew past. They delighted her eyes with a rainbowed spectacle of moving fury. The descent from the mountaintop moved like a flash flood of liquid paintings, Matisse, Picasso, Vincent descended in masse.
With their flowing pencils and paints, with their minds and inspiring speckled blood. Their drops spilled and congealed, creating vast empires of dancing swirls and laughing dancers. She still clung, yet not with fear, not with the desperation of a woman dropping from a cliff. She clung with all the force of love that moved like an endless tunnel of delight through the rhythm of time. She clung with wet palms that sparkled even in the night sky. Within the darkness of no moon, she found her way home. Found her way into the arms of the whiskered man.
The sand beneath her seemed to drift, it moved like red waves, the ones she remembered from a childhood of tea parties and silent mixtures. Her cups were always full of red earth, she served herself, her only guest, and swallowed each grain individually. One by one, they made the journey from her cup, to her mouth, down the tight confines of her throat. She swallowed all night, thinking of nothing, feeling only one world after the other enter her.
She was full, carrying the knowledge of the unborn, the undead, the missing words. She held them all. She was bound, she had taken them in, becoming them, becoming all in the process. Red like the light of the October moon. Red like a desire that burns from her dark center . And there was no one else. The feathers bloomed from her ears like twigs from a demented tree. Red, gold, green, shimmering like satin. Glowing like the collection of stars clustered around the nearest planet. Satin trim and soft. Long and stripped.
She saw her reflection in the silver pond.