Birdy

have to meet. I’m beginning to think everything comes together somewhere.
    In the dream, I sing. I can never remember singing as a boy, but singing as a bird is completely different from anything I’ve ever known. It isn’t what I expected at all. I sound like a roller canary singing, but the words I’m hearing are in English and sound almost like poetry. I’m hearing myself simultaneously as bird and as boy speaking words. I’m singing the thoughts I’ve had about flying combined with the feeling I’m having as a bird.
    One of the first songs I sing sounds like this: There is nothing of fright when one flies free. There’s only the taste of air and touching nowhere. I see the earth below and it’s down the way the sky is up when you look from the ground. Everything is out or away and the play of gravity is like sand.
    Now, I know I’m not Birdie completely. I can hear Birdie from the breeding cage. She wants me to sing more but the singing is still hard for me. Alfonso starts singing to Birdie. I can understand his whole song for the first time. He sings this: Come fly with me; dry thistles sliding through a crystal sky, you and I. Below, mountains hump and clouds hover while cows slumber seven stomachs deep in clover. We glide together in twisting currents of air, caring for nothing. We are each other and we take wing to find fertile fields and silent beaches.
    I listen and know Alfonso couldn’t sing that song. A bird can know nothing about cows’ stomachs. I’ve just learned about them in biology class. Alfonso has never flown over mountains or clouds; these are my ideas. Alfonso is singing and I’m hearing his song with my mind, in my dream. Can Alfonso really talk, or is it all just me? I can’t believe that. Alfonso’s taught me things about flying I could not know myself. I can’t put this together in my dream. During this night, I know I’m dreaming all during the dream.
     
    There’s one thing I’m sure of. Singing is like flying. When I sing, I close my eyes and see myself flying through and over trees. I’m sure that’s why canaries sing. They were put in cages because they sang and now they sing because they’re in cages.
    Canaries have been in cages for over four hundred years. A canary generation, the time from birth till breeding, is less than a year. A human generation is about twenty years. Therefore, birds have been in cages for a time that for humans would be eight thousand years. In fact, canaries and humans have been in cages the same number of generations.
    I begin to wonder what men do that’s the same as canary singing. It’s probably thinking. We built this cage, civilization, because we could think and now we have to think because we’re caught in our cage. I’m sure there’s a real world still there if I can only get out of the cage. But, would my canaries sing as much if they could live in the open and fly freely? I don’t know. I hope some day to find out.
    The breeding cages are going at a great rate. I already have birds out of the nest. Soon, I’m going to have some ready to put in the flight cages. I don’t know whether to put them in the cage where I am in my dream or in the other one. I’m still trying to decide this when I start dreaming of Perta.
    When I say dreaming, I don’t mean I’m dreaming of Perta the way I’m dreaming the rest of the dream. I’m dreaming of Perta in my dream. I’m sleeping in my dream on one foot as a bird and I’m dreaming of Perta.
    Perta is smaller than most female canaries. She has a light green head blushing back to a lighter yellow-green on her breast, then darker green on her back. Her wings vary from layer to layer of her feathers. This gives a variegated surface like a blue check pigeon, only in shades of green. She has white bars on the outside of her wings because her last two flight feathers on each wing are white. Her shape is roundish and she flies with small movements, fast flapping but great grace and speed. She has markings over her eyes almost like eyebrows. Her beak and legs aren’t as dark as Alfonso, nor as light pink as Birdie.
    In my dream, I’m sleeping on the top perch of the aviary and dreaming. I’m lonely and tired; I’m sleepy and sleeping in my own dream. I know this much. It’s several nights before I realize I’m dream-dreaming Perta.
    In the dream-dream, I’m alone in the flight cage and look down to see someone at the food dish. I know immediately it’s a female. She either