Reading Chaucer and Joyce to Parakeets
Jack – blue
feathered tempest and
Jorma – caged friendly flash of green light
love to sing songs that
go straight
to my heart;
(mine to theirs, not so much)
but when I
recite Chaucer they rejoice, chirp and sing
I glimpse the
trail medieval: Middle English in birdsong
Yet for
Finnegans Wake they aver – squawk in loud discord
obvious
avian sonic displeasure – modernism
may not be for the birds
o, simple things often are
ineluctable, contrarian
they exist, just Are
(& are not so simple)
is the
disparity in accord due to my performance?
they live (Jack and Jorma) much more acoustically than I
I intrude blindly into their milieu and they respond
participants in a phenomenology of sound, music, word
Unlike are
we to birds
dull are we
not to live and thrive in sound and song and colors streaming
our colors
mute, our songs discordant, our minds
clouded,
separate
unlikely to
know as do they
the jointure of things
perhaps
Chaucer’s bird-sense sustains across centuries
or, maybe
something even more than that pertains
perhaps mixtures
of sound, feeling and magic matter more to parakeets than to me!
or, maybe
they just aren’t Irish
birds who sing, birds who also talk
in an emptiness of time un-flying,
undying
birds sing my words
alit on my finger
birds and
words fly together atwitter
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