Tomas Q. Morin Our Prophets It shouldn’t have surprised me while reading Gorky’s remembrance of Tolstoy and devouring chicken on a blanket in view of the muddy waters that I should see a parakeet misnamed the Quaker parrot by some scientist poet with a sense of humor, not to mention fashion, because he found modesty in the way their lime color drapes over their backs and down each wing in a way that reminds one of a key-lime pie; though not the one with the dome of meringue which resembles the dress of a house finch, rather the wobbly body of the sad supermarket doppelganger; the impostor with the God-awful filling tinted green by they of the white aprons and soufflé hats who no doubt assume we are all children of Truth and would thus not know how to suffer a yellow-white pie with lime in its name; much less something important like the rapture that came and went last week for which the stores baked a special angel food cake labeled Manna and stuffed with so many mulberries it bled through; and no one I know vanished and perhaps it was a rapture that extinguished the tribe of Attsurs from which the parrot came that Tolstoy recounts to Gorky as possessing the last traces of the history of its lost people in its sickled tongue. And how long did it take the Attsur scholar after he took the bird home, fed it dates and schnitzel from his own lips, to translate the precious words for “mama” and “wine,” “kitty” and “bye-bye,” and when the rapture comes again tomorrow and we finally vanish as predicted what bird will speak for us if not our monkish parakeet souring in the oak above us like a cheap piece of pie that calls out “hungry, hungry, hungry”?
Posted on: Fri, 26 Jul 2013 00:00:38 +0000
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