A Poem by Nick Lantz

Birds love sound more than they love food. If scientists could harness and utilize the sonic energy produced by a single parakeet, all the working oil rigs could be unplugged and turned into coral beds. A happy bird is a chattering bird. To host these little auctioneers in your house is to be made aware of silence's palpability: it's not some empty vessel waiting to be filled, but a real thing with heat and a heartbeat in which sound waits like an unread book. It's its own aqua vibrating ache. Left dormant and untilled by parrots, silence is a sound sadder and louder than any song.


Of the Parrat and Other Birds that Can Speake by Nick Lantz

It is for certain knowne that they have died
for very anger and griefe that they could not
learn to pronounce some hard words.
—Pliny the Elder

When you buy the bird for your mother
you hope it will talk to her. But weeks pass
before it does anything except pluck the bars
with its beak. Then one day it says, “infect.”

 Your mother tells you this on the phone,
and you drive over, find the frozen meals
you bought for her last week sweating
on the countertop. “In fact,” she says

in answer to your question, “I have been
eating,” and it’s as you point to the empty
trash can, the spotless dishes, that you
realize the bird is only saying, “in fact,”

that this is now the preamble to all
of your mother’s lies. “In fact,” she says,
“I have been paying the bills,” and you
believe her until you find a cache

of unopened envelopes in the freezer.
More things are showing up where
they shouldn’t. Looking out the back
window one evening you see craters

in her yard. While she’s watching TV,
you go out with a trowel and excavate
picture frames, flatware that looks like
the silver bones of some exquisite

animal. You worry when you arrive
one day and see the open, empty cage
that you will find the bird dead, stuffed
in an oven mitt and left in a drawer,

but you find it sitting on her shoulder
in the kitchen. “In fact,” she says,
“he learned to open the cage himself.”
The bird learns new words. You learn

which lies you can ignore. The stroke
that kills her gives no warning, not—
the doctor assures you—that anyone
can predict such things. When you

drive home that night with the cage
belted into the passenger seat, the bird
makes a sound that is not a word
but that you immediately recognize

as the sound of your mother’s phone
ringing, and you know it is the sound
of you calling her again and again,
the sound of her not answering.

Nick Lantz is the author of two books: We Don't Know We Don't Know (Graywolf Press) and The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors' House (University of Wisconsin Press). He is a former Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and is the current Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College.

Comments

[Laura Orem]

This is a terrific poem. Thanks for posting it.

[Jenny Your Fabness]

From a Parrot and Phoenix that Can Speak in Song.

When she parroted for us, we hoped she would recite the rosary,
or pronounce herself a bird who'd learned the Gettysburg Address.

Emerge from air in some sliver of an exquisite animal voiced concern,
excavate bones on the day of her arriving in what is spoken, to speak

and open, it is not the empty word, pale magic cage she'd find the bird
half-dead in, stuffed, left in a drawer, the new words that give no warning.

Strike the reader in a passenger seat, in an oven mitt, with a trowel
on the countertop, learn to love thy neighbor, lie and ignore the spell

that ills her soul-doctor anyone who can at night, such things predict.
Belted bird a sound that makes us butter-winged buffoons fooling

in the sound of our home-drive, definite kin recognized in a cage
phone ringing, and you knowing it is the sound calling, again and again,

the sound of us not answering you.

Todney Bumsden

[Nin Andrews]

Beautiful poem! I just got off the phone with my 93 year old mother to read this . . .

[Nin Andrews]

I mean both poems. I was first commenting on the Lantz poem.

[Comment Field Bully]

Thanks very much Nin. The form my poem's in is 'write-through', which is where you use the words of one poem, as the basic palette for the creation of another. I exercise in this form just for the practise of shuffling words around.

I've had a few poems that have come out the other side as legitimate in their own right. It's a great form to have a go at. My first write-through was of Plath's Colossus.

The write through form is at the opposite end of the compositional spectrum from strict metrical writing, but no less an intellectual challenge, as it is akin to sieving ones mind through a tea strainer; knocking down an edifice of letters, and rebuilding an entirely different text with them.

For example, this original text titled Rule Britannia, I found online and wrote through it:

Out of the bus window I spy a white-haired gentleman on a bicycle wearing a pair of brown brogues, with white socks, khaki desert shorts, an anorak and a black bowler hat. He is a picture of English eccentricity as he whizzes past County Hall and I feel a surge of patriotic pride at the sight of him.

Coming up with this:

Why picture loutish
Eton craic,
a fab lush brogue,
patriotic anoraks
and pride deserting
gentlemen at war
in eccentric sighs?

I slip bowless to
a Sir free land,
no snoot cockers
great nobs to hail.

Cut the tie today
for a happiness few
feel,
aim high
hack
ask fate Howayiz
wah wah
is yiz
wib
us
hdhdwhbk

~

The woman who composed the original is an ex-teacher, now pole dancer, from Kent, who keeps two blogs and writes under the nom de guerre of Glamour Puss.

The found piece is on her blog,
Clairvoyance, that she started 15 months after beginning her main blog, The Pole Affair (now open to invited readers only). The Pole Affair deals with her day to day work and personal life, whilst Clairvoyance (19C French: clear seeing), is her ruminating a tad deeper about existence, what she writes as:

"Elucidating Everyday Wonder Made Manifest"

~

It is a good exercise for honing one's intellectual fluidity, as you don't have to think of anything apart from the letters you have to play with. A great method to use on small texts, particularly blogspot comments at various po-mo sites that take 'emselves super-seriously, as one can take a pompous deposit and twist its tenor into the opposite.

It's not important to keep the exact same words I think, only for the very first one you do, as you effectively give yourself an unreal goal, achieve it once then slacken the rules to fit when done. Like deploying meter. Once you have that form to your own personal satisfaction, then you can use it how you wish.

SYLVIA PLATH - WRITE THROUGH

Did she angle wonder on the grasp
extending reason her creation
drove wild beyond loathing,
by constantly digging in hunt of sound
to knit rock-firm sharp picture alive with,
like a gem stitched braid
upon whose surface
her eye discerned a myriad of texture?

Did her mind’s farthest anchor reach a coloured butterfly
wind chanced and framed like a Japanese print
of bold delicacy
fittingly unambiguous in a mirror of detail
where every line rehearsed perfection,
crisp as stalk fresh shoots?

Nosed in did her compass net an imprint
of discordant shadow in savage butt and jagged antinomy
absent of balance nature or measure

----------- write through---------

like a ruin of anarchy to the horizon line?
Did she mix thirty years of laboured hours
in little pails and gluepots
to create an oracle married in shadow?
Crawl like an ant over immense dead stones
in the black fluted night
and proceed to entirely open
the lightning sun with the skull of her brow as it rises?
Grunt cackle and glue the silt from her throat
to bray at Orestiea,
or some Roman mule god with acanthine hair
scaling the tumuli of bald acres under red hills?
Was she never counted by her father
or others who
none the wiser
no longer listened
as she dredged her bawdy bones of mourning
and pieced together with blank eyes
her pithy historical mouthpiece
left to colour and stroke our ears?
Could we perhaps lunch like barnyard pigs on the cornucopia of stars
which littered her tongue like lysol on clear white plates
climb ladders of weedy cypress jointed
by the wind of a blue sky arching above to
properley squat at some old forum and consider
landing keel and plum on the pillar of her great lips?

Desmond Swords