crow morphology
On New Year’s Day, crow became a parrot.
I asked him how he did this. Here is our conversation:
simple.
disregard the moon and all arrangements of stars.
if stones stand be sure light nowhere specially shines.
do not go to the great tree in the forest, the one that is itself and all its ancestors.
slaughter nothing.
light no fire.
scatter no grain.
spill no milk no honey no blood.
do not mark yourself with stakes or nails or knives or thorns, the bones of dead creatures or the inks of poisonous flowers.
simple.
know who you are and choose
to behave differently.
i went to sleep on my usual branch.
it doesn’t matter what i dreamed. the dream was of myself.
typical.
when i awoke, i cracked one eye like crow. then i opened both eyes like parrot. i flashed my wings like parrot. i did not caw i squawked.
what is the difference between parrot and crow?
what do you know? i choose how i act.
pretty parrot pirate ship. squawking word mirror.
what do you know? i know crow
stole you something shiny to rob you of your lustre.
is that a mirror?
where where going
you are you
are you are
going go
hello
(read the last conversation with the crow here.)
et tu, teapot?
I came to my desk to write you about my teapot. I set my teapot on the desk and sat myself at the desk and lifted my pen from the desk to place it upon my scrapbook which sits upon the desk.
Then my teapot spit-up a postcard.
At first I thought it was steam, which was a little odd, even for my teapot, as I had almost finished its now-tepid tea. But the steam unfolded like a leaf, and drifted down upon my scrapbook. It was not a leaf. It was a postcard:
I don’t want to write an ode to my teapot anymore. Summer is almost over and I haven’t gone to the shore…soon it will be too cold, which will be a great burden off my shoulders. The burden of “maybe now?” is unendurable. I’m tired of being asked where I’m going. When the grasses change and the ocean foams upon the shore like the maw of Kerberus dragged up from hell, maybe crow will stop being a parrot and the birds, wistful for longer days and safer climes, will be happy to fluff up their feathers and stay inside.
Flipping through my scrapbook, it’s evident that last summer was much nicer than this summer; last summer we had fashion shows, I sported my swim-suit and drank fizzy beverages and learned how to watch movies. This summer has been one long avoidance of crow-who-is-parrot’s persistent questioning: WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
Now my teapot, my abiding paraclete, is spewing forth postcards. SPEWING FORTH. Like the ocean spews forth the drowned and the dead.
Why, why would I want to go back there?
I want a real postcard from Henriette, soon.
–The Odalisque
I am the odalisque who lives in an obelisk. I converse with birds.
