for M.C. <br /> <br />A fool for love, an inner refugee, <br />sees a peacock strutting in the birdhouse <br />high on a branch and fanning <br />the broadest, most articulated fan tail <br />the fool for love has ever seen. <br />“Come fly with me!” the fool calls to the peacock, <br />but the bright bird keeps strutting up and down <br />above the fool for love there on the ground. <br /> <br />A blackbird comes and settles on his shoulder. <br />His pecks are rough caresses as he asks him, <br />“Why do you keep staring at that tree?” <br />“Peacock!” the fool for love cries, but the blackbird <br />caws back, “Fool! Since when do peacocks fly? <br />Look around the birdhouse: see us towhees, <br />wrens and jays and blackbirds <br />flittering and swooping— <br />what we always do for free.” <br /> <br />All the fool can do is stare. <br />His neck is permanently out of whack; <br />he doesn’t care. <br />But one fine day in slanted light <br />he glances up as usual and spies <br />not his darling bird of paradise <br />but a hank of Christmas tinsel <br />trailing in the birdhouse breeze . . . <br /> <br />Even so he often murmurs, <br />“Peacock!” in his haunted dreams. <br />Ask me why, the reason’s simple: <br />he’s a fool for love, blackbirds <br />are blackbirds, peacocks peacocks, <br />tinsel tinsel.<br /><br />Jonathan Galassi<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/tinsel-tinsel/
