Читать книгу Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation - Curtis LeBlanc - Страница 10

He’s the one who told me how he gathered his skates and, like any kid with lips for lying, told his mother he was meeting friends. He walked five blocks to the Sturgeon River to glide, alone, from Perron Street to the trestle bridge. His feet, steel reeds caught in a current of his own making. In Bruegel, he might see himself, but not in the skaters, together with arms linked, gliding on the green pond of a place nothing like the one he suffered in. He’s in the birds, grounded, about to croak beneath the wooden deadfall. Unhappiness, a solid sheet dropping often on top of him.

Even in Bruges, before he idled the rental in the street to relieve himself in a café we had no intention of sitting in, he and I found a way to be unhappy together. It was our sleight-of-hand trick, a father of absolutes and a son stuck in liminal splits. The best photo I ever took of him: in anger, cussing me out in the shadow of the Belfry, that famous bell tower. He was somehow more himself that way, finally spilling over the lip of his unacceptable demureness, mostly quietude and kindness in the body of a man at odds with the men who held themselves above him.

Father, I have become you, some small shape in the foreground, bracing myself for another record winter and waiting for the sky to fall.