"I was born with feathers."

I was a quick wet boy, diving too deep for coins
All of your street light eyes wide on my plastic toys
Then when the cops closed the fair, I cut my long baby hair
Stole me a dog-eared map and called for you everywhere

Have I found you
Flightless bird, jealous, weeping or lost you…

-Flightless Bird, Iron & Wine

Strangers do not often visit Stone—except as part of the traveling circus. Even then they come in the night, unleash their strangeness, and are gone, leaving behind just a hint that there could be more to the world than mud and stones. There could be places with elephants and tigers and fat women with beards.

—from the as-yet untitled manuscript

Take what you can carry and the rest we will destroy.
This summer’s gonna wreck us, gonna crush this little boy.
This will be the season when I learn not to forget that the ones we call our friends ain’t our enemies quite yet.
We’ll be singing Love Love Love, that’s how we stay together, Love Love Love.
He does these things to grind our bones, he tattles like a lamb.
Someone oughta tell this fool that he don’t know where we been.
I never seen him cry before but I know it’s coming soon.
I knew that you would break this boy, make him cry for you.

-Some Are Love, Des Ark

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

-Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole

In villages where women bore most of the weight of a constricted life, witches flew by night on broomsticks or even on lighter vehicles such as ears of wheat or pieces of straw… I find it a steady feature in anthropology, this link between the levitation desired and the privation actually suffered. It is this anthropological device that literature perpetuates.

—Italo Calvino