"After the minotaur," or "a poem about birds"

Once, I was an elaborate bird, the sort that riles,

And I listened to a goose laughing at a joke,

Made by another goose, about migration patterns.

Now geese, as we ornithologists know, have hardly any feet at all

And are silly, and know nothing about myths:

So I was picking among bits of people

And orange blossom carpets and I found!

I found!

I found a string!

The princess’ string,

All rot-bare and brown,

And I tongued to its zenith, as I always have, and found the ankle

Of a wrong-bred child, three-times-tied and hiding dead

In the dusty labyrinth heart.

Birds, as everyone knows, have the language

Of fibrous things, and so we spoke,

And the string was a philosopher:

“As the most important twine

Legend ever thought to whelp,

Should I still live after I saved them whom I saved?”

And then it died, as strings will,

And I looped it – one, two, three – around my roof as it once looped

The ankle of the beast – so is my house:

A basket of myths, a million desiccated, string-girded ankles.

Now floors, as all mothers know, are made of stems

And I made mine.

I turned in the hollow and was

A pregnant dog, a gossip, I pressed

My paws to my face. Then, of course,

I flicked my tail feathers in a blue-black iris dance

And I talked about leks, because I am a bird,

And sex is pressing.

But my husband came home,

And he opened his mouth

And another birds’ feathers flew out,

All glittering and brown-striped and cool,

And I stomped my scaly little feet and I barked,

I wailed:

“Now I see it in your patterns,

You’re only a blank-eyed ceiling.

If only, if only polyandry!”

And so my heart was broken.

But love, as all dogs know, is never without knots

And marks, and wood-bore’s houses:

And so I kicked at him and was vicious and

I couldn’t see

Because I cried little salty bird-tears.

He was awfully frightened, he closed his eyes,

This, as philanderers know, halfway-works about half of the time,

And so he ran off and seized hold of other, tamer birds.

And with that

I became everything I said I wasn’t:

I am a dog crumpled like a dirty sheet on a porch.

I am a child who wins by stealth.

I am on fire and I am red and I am happy.

And as we all know,

When I die – and all myths do – 

They’ll put me in a box,

Under some potted plants,

On the back balcony.

And someday they’ll remember!

Someday they’ll draw me out

By a string looped thrice

Around my desiccated ankle.


I had this conversation last night with a friend of mine and now I'm ashamed. I'm love-blind to the processes of my formation; I haven't ever thought that the things people say are good for me might be slow-stifling me. I am nervous or terrified or anxious or all three: who am I without the chemical drip that makes my head walk a straight line? will I be someone like everyone else whom I don't even have the passion to hate because they seem so small? And I say I'm not afraid of threats to self - what about the rest of me? There's another girl-woman in my brain I've yet to meet, because the last time I was her I was so small. And maybe I'm afraid that I'll have to start over, from the beginning; maybe I'm afraid that anything anyone's ever felt towards me will dry up and blow away because I've been lying about everything, somehow. Maybe I'm afraid to be less a machine; I know I'm afraid to be less in control.