from The way birds become homonyms: an aviary

A bird would reach but be secret. (An Essay on Hitchcock)

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In The Birds there are no metaphors.
If you want a metaphor you
must take the bathroom mirror into
the theater, and position it in such a way
that you can watch the entire
film through its pane. But why bother
the bathroom, why strip it of its sole
companion, its only eye, the only
way it can monitor the secret movements
of its minions? The birds are meaningless.
They're not the mother's projection
of an absent father, the spectral penis
ghosting the family house. Nor have they ever
been real. But then I don't care
because I haven't been born yet.
The birds are here before me, and they will
remain after, and no one knows why they gather.
I can only drive my car
through the birds, knowing full well that
they've replaced the road. Because birds become
roads after they're transformed into and from
the weather they once forecasted.