big empty sky #4: lakebed slowly being emptied of its contents during a drought

Felt like a plop, like a hiccup, Northwest edge of myself.
Sparrow? Sparrow.
Ribbed feathers struggling in a crater of wet mud. Definitely a disease. Its tiny arched claw scrawling patterns into me. Asemic writing. Ur-texts. Incantatory code unbroken by modern minds, languages stripped of all obvious meaning and trailing shadows of unseen logic. Maybe the original language. Unbreathed.  
About six feet South of a smashed and rusted Natty can. Crumpled under the tender foot of Jenny Barrington, October 17, 2007. So drunk she didn’t feel a thing, pointing her heel down to get her full weight over it and then picking up the wrinkled metal disc and arcing it across the waxing moon like just a glint caught in the ambient glow of headlights. It’ll the be the last thing the dying sparrow sees.
Two bird metaphors in Ortega Y Gasset’s “To The Reader”, delicious flesh before the meat of Meditations on Quixote. What were they? Metaphors for depth requiring surface in order to become visible.
Volunteers find me, their orange vests and spears stabbing at the trash on the dried curled mud skin of my periphery. Mostly cans. Domestic. A shoe. Athletic. A few condoms. Unused. Their own depth revealed to them in my diminished surface. The bric a brac of themselves contained within me. Sunlight refracted in sharp glimmers against the desolate...can’t call it detritus...the unified but lost substance of themselves.
Widow’s son finds a box, tin. Looks older than it is in the sheath of rust. A tiny coffin for time itself. Rocks inside older than me, but they came from me.
He finds a faded magazine warped and twisted. Almost pure white image of a mother staring intently at a prop baby and both of their eyes missing and next to them my mud in a streak, a miniature Ionic column.
A metal disc, could have been a coin. Could have been Caesar's image.
A hard leather glove and single yellow shoelace compressed into a knot.
He leaves with his mother in the car without having heard the voices broadcast from a house stilted and leaning on my Southern edge, almost collapsing into me. The dead coming in so quietly and clear.
Even now.
“Drumming, falling back into the roiling wave. The world has forgotten itself.” Flitting in and out of the seance.
What was Jose’s first metaphor? Birds over over a swamp. Their shadows little freckles on the marshy skin. Singing, dropping into the miasma. “The past falls dead within our memory”. Was the surface the birds or the swamp? The Past or the memory? What was the depth it revealed? The second was St. Thomas, the truth coming to us like birds wounded in flight.
The sparrow now dead in me, having etched hieroglyphics in a final neurological spasm, marking me in some way permanently beyond my transformation.   

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