Loving Falcons

I’m sat on my terrace as the day holds out just an hour longer. The sky is stretched blue, and the one cloud is a scrape of salmon hues.
Looking over the long patio, away from the sound of the babies crying nighttime and a pretty girl talking at a dinner table - I move my chair to see her more clearly, she’s dark, maybe Spanish. She pops open a Prosecco and exclaims bawdily with her friend. I’ve moved the chair to where next door’s Mainecoon has pooed on my potted beans, I’m about to move it back and reproach myself gently for perving when from the 5th floor a pretty neighbour calls down to me. I look all around to discern the source of the noise when I spot her up there, toothbrush in hand. Juliet. She’s french with a home counties english accent. I’m always talking up to her on a balcony. The Romeo jokes have been made. Tomorrow she’ll defend her thesis. The day after she returns to France. I won’t see her again. I look over the Italian roofs, tiles, chimneys and satellites, above an incredibly morally flexible balcony featuring both a Palestinian flag and a trans rainbow flag next to each other (jokes of swastikas and stars of david come to mind), rising far far above, there is La Mole Antonelliana. Torino’s finest and most iconic building. A sort of Jewish minaret (the flags seem less strange now) which now houses an illustrious cinema museum. I saw Martin Scorsese and Willem Dafoe there last October (the Spanish girl has tied her blood red top into a crop, showing a gloriously brown belly). During the day, you can travel two-thirds of the way up, where there is a vista panoramica of the lovely Piedmontese capital (the beans stink).

I’m looking at whence cometh the festival of chirping, where dozens of Alpine Swifts are mobbing the noble queen of the sky, a Peregrine Falcon. The falcon has made the city’s great icon her home. She orbits its bony, skyward-pointing finger, flapping strangely. The smaller birds harry her en masse, she half-heartedly quivers her wings. Seeing her fly like this is funny, like a parent racing a toddler. If she turned it on, even these swifts, the fastest horizontal fliers, at times tracing after insects like world war dogfighters, would never knew what hit them. God I wish she’d turn it on.

She made an angular silhouette against the blue canvas, arched and landed now and then, and then replunged. I always stop what I’m doing when I see her, I always will.

The blue has deepened now, the red lights are upon the Mole. The birds have fallen away, the falcon has retreated to her glowering perch. The first bat whirs passed my head. Below, a pizzeria, like a Hopper painting, sits empty. The Spanish girl is still talking, but she’s obscured by an attractive Spanish man. Amber glows from bedrooms and kitchens up and down the palazzo. The beans continue to stink. The first star has come out, and twinkles in the summer blue.