I.
In a separate dream last night,
I owned a small, soft, gray and white bird
with black markings so delicate
they looked painted on
though
in waking, walking around life
I have never owned a living bird
II.
The only bird I’ve ever owned is Pete, the wooden parrot—three feet tall, painted soft shades of green and pink like those pastel mints served at dinner parties in crystal bowls in the 1960s. Or at least, that’s how it was with my mother.
Pete the parrot was trash-picked off a Florida curb, for love, by me—and brought home as the single piece of carry-on luggage that, to date, has gotten the most comments of any odd thing I’ve brought on a plane.
No one else loves Pete as much as I do. Truly, no one understands what I see in him.
This is not the first time.
He hangs now on my bedroom wall where he is the first and last thing I see each day. If it is a day when I end up in my own bed. And excepting when I take him off his hook for special occasions.
Or when we’re traveling.
III.
In college, Anne had a bird. You knew to be careful and move quickly in and out of her dorm room because she let the bird fly around inside. All of this, as so much about my darling friend Anne, was
Against The Rules
I was always a little bit nervous about the rule breaking and also nervous about
tiny claw foot landing
on my shoulder, or my scalp
Plus, this was college—so there were
often
Happy Drunkards with much to say
barging in and out
leaving doors open
in their exuberance to be near
others of their kind
IV.
Once, after I divorced your father
and it was just you and I in our house,
when you were still in high school
Junior year? Senior? Old enough
to know that you knew Everything
and that I was Woefully Uninformed,
a dunce, really—which led to headache for you
(from all that eye-rolling)
During that time, we came home once
and found a large black bird in our house
though the windows were closed
The bird— possibly a crow possibly not
as that was one of the many things
I did not know in those days
or for that matter, in these days still
Back then, you threw a blanket
over the bird and carried it outside
where it could fly away
and did
Both of us blamed you for letting it in through
a long circuitous path tied to an unlatched garage door
Though, honestly, we never knew for certain
that it didn’t arrive from some parallel universe
Where Things Were Different
V.
When I was a small child, back in the days of pink and green mints in crystal dishes, my grandmother owned a parakeet she kept in a tall domed cage. They lived in my house, my grandmother and her bird.
Wings and cages made no sense to me when we were surrounded by windows, so I opened the cage, opened a window.
Later, there were tears.
Epilogue.
In last night’s dream,
our dogs killed the little gray bird
with its soft feathers and delicate black markings.
Not out of hunger or hunting instinct—
No, the bird was a casualty,
a side effect of Dog Exuberance.
Or that tiny, soft, most recent bird
was killed only for a coda
to close this latest chapter
in my life with the birds.
Puff Of Smoke Poems 