Sparrow Sculpture
Inside the rust of the dilapidated machines, where the sun scars the grass into paper, a sparrow remakes from bone and iron-shards, the hands of men. An assembly line is a collage of well-ordered gestures, perfected mimicry, a rhythm collapsing against itself. And the sun is melting the city—brick by brick. Its rays a form of blur on the sparrow's wings, stripping away the plumage to reveal the cartilage, like a weight-obsessed teenager, running through the city's twisting gulleys at dawn, ignoring the dangers of the raven-black emptiness that envelops the sleeping porches. A group of women in uninterrupted white in the middle of the street: wailing in loud chants, tearless. Across the metro-station, in an unnamed alleyway, another woman refuses to shut her door. A path ajar for her son to walk in. Without having to be stopped by the rituals of knocking. Knocking and waiting for someone else to unbolt. Only he was killed—encountered, four decades and half ago. His bones scattered in this estuary indistinguishable from conch-shells that pebble our paths to distraction. The sparrow keeps count of each of its falling feathers, bends its neck to spot through the shadows of cigarette smoke, its limbs morphing into a kind of terracotta. A meticulous carving, in whose catacombs the sparrow will excavate a neon-light map. A sliver of glass inside the sparrow's mouth, a broken light bulb, a furcated tongue—the sparrow is learning to render otiose the morning-whistle, the dust raised by the sound of the several feet marching daily towards complicit labor, while in a city thousands of miles away, a soldier's pellet gun, shot in our names, blinds a fourteen-year old girl. What rages through this city is the opposite of storm—a silence growling louder and louder. Inside the abandoned factory-yard, a laid-off worker splits open the photographer-girl: an inheritance of an incompetent rage against anything that makes suffering beautiful. In a house in another neighborhood across the city, a couple is sitting down to dinner. The meaningless jokes they will share, is no compensation for the certitude with which they disagree with each other, yet does not dare to break apart.