Ravenswood

The commute was about scrap lumber stacked at the side of the tracks, and ailanthus, that tenacious asparagus, sprouting in a hundred crappy lots. It was about car alarms, how we live in a city in love with that sound. About the beginning and the middle but not yet the end. And the birds. (I think I might have mentioned the birds.) Our striving, our failures, the sky and the birds. “Of all that is seen and unseen.” Let’s vow to steal that phrase from church. Ravenswood, a station. I disembark. I am walking home. Above me, now, a seagull glides, a kite gone so high I can barely see it. Ravenswood, an avenue, bordering the tracks. With the gull rising in the western sky, I can imagine we are close to the ocean, but in the end I suppose Lake Michigan will do. Ravenwood, a neighborhood. The gull, I want to hear it. I will name this seagull God’s thinnest angel, formed from a scolding, three minnows, and a knife. Like everyone, I want so much. I want to know what I am for, and why the world works as the world. So many prayers are answered with silence. But whether silent, or too far above me, the gull—even as I name it I do not hear it call.