December
2007
Ermis
Our pigeon visits us daily in our hushed Paradise
He has a tail like a vampires teeth,
A morbid sash of wispy feathers;
Fanned out as he flickers away,
Momentarily distracted from our childsplay.
On returning he whispers something into my ear.
A message from,
A lost love,
Perhaps,
Or a dead relative come to say farewell.
What’s the difference?
Once, as summer showers began to threaten,
He even nibbled your finger.
A token of thanks for the amusement of it all.
He had forgotten,
You see, that
We were of a different kind.
Of his tail my headdress is made.
A blinding shroud, a decorated deafness.
I love him but I did not know.
I asked you to catch him
For me, my love, fluttering in the cage that was your clasped hands.
Your nails on my neck and your breath fanning his frantic feathers across my ear,
Like threads of hair, cobwebs drifting.
On being released
Flustered, he ruffled his quills once or maybe twice
And continued to peck at the shiny thing
That he could not name
But that looked like a cat’s
Yellow
Eye.
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