The Call to Wings: An Elegy for a Parakeet

    When Morpheus, the drowsy god of sleep,
Abandoned me to fret and pace and weep
I fled to fill the sapphire-curtained bath
And melt the hours away: The prickly path
I chose or that chose me when I was young:
To polish phrases in the English tongue
Till golden odes in mellow tones were wrung
With patient ancient craft from when the years were young,
Persueded me to pluck a favored tome
From dusty shelves; so I began to comb
The weathered mansion's paneled library:
What fine old books from book sales could I see
(My only treasure left beside my cats,
Monopolizing beds like mounds of Russian hats).
I, sick with weeping, aimed to ease my tears
With something similar from elder years:
Perhaps to read of loss would lessen mine.
I strove to cull a heap of scrolls divine.
My favorite translation's here! Catullus!
For his amour once lost a sparrow thus,
And one of Ovid's lover's lost a bird,
Upon the loss he penned a pretty word,
The bird his lady lost was twice-ly missed:
For plumes and fluting song. Eyes all a-mist,
In tears again, I stumble in to bathe:
The tile is fragrant steam up to the lathe.
    Upon a chair I plunk a haul of odds
And ends: some notebooks, pens, and volumes, wads
Of tissue damp the trash-pale near the tub,
There's kleenex in the holder: rub-a-dub!
The only thing that gives this tattered loo some style:
That thick lush cushy white and welcome pile:
Egyptian towels a neighbor gave me.
    I slide down in the sultry foaming sea
Of bathing wavelets smoothed with soothing oils;
The surly gusts all whoosh athwart the gargoils;
The freezy draft invades the flickering room
Where candles strive to banish mournful gloom.
I glance: the curtains, blue! And seething pain
Makes tears sweep in in hurricanes of rain,
Again! Perhaps my reading this will help.
"O my poor beautiful bird! O what help
Was I to him!?"  And harder now I weep.
"When his bell tolled for him I was asleep!"
    I read and read and read and weep and weep.
Serenity persuades me I can sleep,
But, no, the muse has tip toed in, and slain
Both sleep and tears: imposed her gentle reign,
And I re-steam the bath, with raisin skin,
And, dripping on the paper, I begin.

    No parrot, bright with all the brilliant dyes
That Nature crushed from jewels, nothing wise
Who knew to speak and reason with us fools
Who wreck the earth, no gold canary who
Knew how to serenade his ingenue,
And with his bill flute honeyed swoons of love,
My Parakeet was no cool amorous dove.
    Yet he was worth the wealth of Rome to me,
He was as blue as the Sicilian Sea,
And sapphire wavelets riffled every plume
All tipped with sprays of snow like ocean-spume;
And he was wild! He was as free as flame!
Nor did one tender gesture ever slip
From his soft tremble: he, enraged, would nip
With his curved swords: my blue falcon would tear
My clumsy thumb: his prey if it was bare.
Nor would he with his lovely cloudy spouse
Chirp calmly on: they'd raucously carouse
In some bird language so ungodly loud
Like chimp-house chatter from a monkey crowd.
    Yet they, my Sea and Cloud, were dear to me.
I loved them both surpassing tenderly.
And when my Sea, my blue Australian wave,
Flew on to death, he seemed to grace the grave,
Like Earth's blue jewel in space's sable night.
    Alas for beauty and his lady bright!
Who now glides on alone, his silver moon,
So silent in an alabaster swoon.
I, through a teeming tempest, rapt in tears:
"He should have lived at least for seven years!"
Perhaps his passion for the sons of air
Betrayed him to the wires of his lair,
Perhaps it's that. Perchance the hail and sleet
In bone-freeze drafts so nipped his tropic feet
They gave my valiant scrap of blue a chill,
And Boreas one more innocent kill.
For through these rattling panes of rippling glass
The icy winds like winding serpents pass.
My antipodean avian, a friend
From places where the deer hop up on end.
My birthday gift, with his sweet beauty queen,
His opalescent dappled Norma Jean.
    His loveliness has died! Gone, in the earth
Are his luxuriant plumes! His luscious worth
Of feathers! His warm wealth of sapphire dyes,
His lovely swiftness and alas his eyes!
    Now all ye songbirds sing a sad lament!
O pipe ye warblers loud, for heaven's rent:
A fragile fragment of the sapphire sky
Is torn from the ethereal blue to die!
    Ye mournful nightingales, who serenade
The midnight rose in every moonlit glade,
Ye choirs of tuneful choristers! O grieve
Lamenting that thy caged compeer should leave.
    Come! Fluting robins! Pour melodious trill
In fond farewell from every amber bill
For my dear pet, thy peer beyond the pane,
Who, by the wire, as thee by glass, was slain.
    Come all ye blue jays, plumed with lofty crowns,
Ye gorgeous lovers and resourceful clowns,
And try to make me smile through all my tears!
And sing for my blue fool, too green in years.
    O where were all the birds near to the gods?
And feathered angels with their sceptered rods?
    O where was Horus, whose great falcon eyes
Could guide my sweetheart to a flight more wise.
    Where was the Lord upon that fatal morn,
Whose universal love for the forlorn
Protects the merest sparrow? Gabriel's horn?
    Ah me! What would that miracle have done!
His hour was spent! Alas, the race was run.
    My tiny cavalier his nimble sword
Plied in his seeds, and it is said the Lord
Protects the merest sparrow, all his sins
Could not be grave, yet Satan always wins
Or so it seems sometimes: Catullus too:
He mourned a sparrow tucked beneath the dew.
Corinna's amiable love-bird too:
Condemned to those dark realms below the dew..

    Lord? was it for the time my feathered fool
Nipped naked fingers bloody in a duel?
What be a wound so small!? My knight-at-arms
Perchance was stoutly championing the charms
Of his so bright-plumed maiden. Yet, alas,
The Lord hath taken him below the grass
Where all must go, whether born to the wing
Or no, in truth whatever song we sing,
We come at last to dreariness and dust,
Worn out by the sweet action of life's lust.
    Was it because he quarreled so headstrong?
Or that he was a sapphire without song?
As for the first, he'd but a tiny head
With little room for wisdom, so he's sped.
And as for headstrong reason deeper delves:
Romeo and Juliet themselves
Were doomed by their own ruckus raising kin
Why didst Thou take him Lord, for what grave sin?
As for his flaws we all knew all along
A parakeet's a creature without song.
    My bird was a mute sign of all that sings.
He floated in upon harmonious wings
Like melody herself, he was so blue!
The Virgin's robe is of a neighbor hue.
    He nipped me into kindness day and night,
And blessed my eyes with smiles, he was delight
Itself, and mickle more he gave
Before I laid his plumage in the grave.
    The call to wings: was he a feather slow?
Was it for this the Lord hath lain him low?
Or did he fly without the wings of love?
Or found no glory in the sacred dove
In shape of whom, Thou didst o'er the abyss brood,
One greater might o'er chaos' mighty feud?
    O Lord have mercy on my tiny dream,
For even Cupid wounds: does not esteem
His mangled victims: he shoots blind and bold,
And cruelly skewers hearts with shafts of gold.
    My sapphire feathered Cupid never meant
Any but loving things: each thumb he rent
Became a kinder, gentler, wiser thumb.
Ah, me! the bird sleeps on, forever dumb.
    O Lord I pray to Thee, let legends live!
My tarnished angel other pinions give,
And have him rise into the realms of light
And make him worthy of Thee, and contrite.
Let my poor bird shed off his earthly pall
To rise with angels, hence to soar with all
The pairs of parakeets in Paradise,
Awaiting his bright love with patient eyes.

Oh, my! I look! The sky's becoming blue.
I've mourned enough, I sigh, and bid adieu.