This poem originally appeared in a slightly different form in Pilgrimage 42.2 (2019)
~
Aubade
A small green parrot preens
on my knee while I sip coffee
and read poetry. Her beak slides
down her wing and comes away
with another feather. She is molting
again. The poems are yours,
mailed last year. Except for the zip
of beak on wing and the coos
of the African gray from her cage,
the morning is quiet. I should get
to work—and will—but I want
to linger in my love
of calm, this space I made
and call my own. The poems
are not love poems, but today
I read them that way. You sent
them freely, requesting nothing.
You meant only to close many miles,
to say Hello, I am thinking of you.
Won’t you think of me too? The parrot
stops preening. She rubs her beak
on my jeans and climbs my leg,
hoping for a shoulder. She has
dropped seven feathers. What
does it mean to molt, to exchange
the old, the outworn, for something
new that looks the same?
Most mornings I repeat this scene:
coffee, a parrot, good words to read.
What would it mean to have you
every day, familiar, sitting
across the table, warming one hand
on a mug while the other wrote
lines not meant for me? Could we
change our lives? Could we
share simplicity?
~
Marisa P. Clark
Marisa P. Clark is a queer writer whose prose and poetry appear or are forthcoming in Shenandoah, Cream City Review, Nimrod, Epiphany, Foglifter, Free State Review, Rust + Moth, Texas Review, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere. Best American Essays 2011 recognized her creative nonfiction among its Notable Essays. A fiction reader for New England Review, she hails from the South and lives in the Southwest with three parrots, two dogs, and whatever wildlife and strays stop to visit.