Sailing away

These have been a few rough days for eyes -- or rather eye, since the right has been signed and sealed as healed. It's been enough to keep me from reading, which discourages me from writing, and the camera has been mostly a paperweight.

Light is unpleasant. Still, the vision when I do look! And with those birds in the sky. . . quite truly hundreds of buzzards and hawks perning in gyres all day, to get all Yeats about it, and above them a frigatebird or two.

Must have been an adventure for them: The World Cup fastboat races have been in town, and with them a squadron of photo helicopters swooping over the harbors and near-shore waters, and then roaring low over the town, and around the giant wheeling masses of birds, to get back to the airport for refueling before roaring back to the action.

Turns out they're turkey buzzards on their way from Ohio to Central America, waiting here for the right breezes to blow them south (at 6 feet from tip to tip they're great gliders, but not terrific fliers).

As usual, The Citizen's Rob O'Neal came through with a spectacular shot -- but not as breathtaking as watching a hundred or more slow-swirling around an aerial drain.

So I lift up my eyes, and and then close them and think of Byzantium and Yeats:

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.