Often as not a poem gives me a right old drubbing while stealing my lunch money, cackling in cold delight all the while. Instead of picking up my Big Chief tablet, shrugging and slinking back to class, I squeal like a ninny for it to give me a wedgie and Dutch Rub to boot.

Of all the species
of eight creeping things

I burst my pink peppercorn
of DNA and became a bird,
like you.
[…]

Like me!

I adopt the guise of a messenger returning from conference with a potentate. I’m tasked with carrying report to my liege lord, the imperious brain. The trick is this: the potentate and my suzerain speak different dialects. Nominally, I straddle the void between them, a Scheherazade translator, fending off the executioner with whatever I can pretend to have heard.

What if Rick of Casablanca had said this: “Of all the gin joints in all the eight towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” Tell me there’s not a jolly problem.

There’s the affair of the peppercorn, the pink one. Everyone knows about deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the double helix and all that (nervous chuckle, bead of sweat on my brow). A bursting of this hide-and-seek spice symbol causes the speaker to become a bird, who tells this to another bird. That much is clear. 

Moving on.

I found your flanks
wattle, primaries
& tail feather.
[…]

Among other things, I love the periods in this poem. They let me collect myself.

I think Bird of Paradise, because it sounds fable-Babelish, but it’s a plant. Better a Phoenix, mythical bird regenerated from fire. (Does the Phoenix have a wattle? Park that for now, your majesty. It’s of little moment for our purposes… heh-heh, sweat bead drops.)

Birds do hop, waddle and fly, not creep. That’s why “Bird” opens with a tone of disbelief, like Rick’s. 

This “finding” that goes on (“I found your flanks…” etc.) is like the biblical “knowing,” a naughty euphemism. It could evoke a mating ritual — yes, two sexy, one-of-a-kind (!) Phoenixes. Myth makes its own weather, sire, like forest fires. Let’s not obsess on hermeneutics. Ask instead what twin firebird hankypanky could engender. 

All our lesser holes-in-the-corner

opened like mantles
—the sun’s orange rind
flew out of the terrifying world.
(“Bird.” by Sean Singer, Poetry, September 2025)

Apocalypse is what! 

In the associative spasm of a million infernos, Earth’s molten core, breaching its mantle, spurts ejecta into Sun’s dissipating corona — its rind. The egg of a future beyond conceiving is fertilized in a hail Mary of cosmic ecstasy. It’s a hellish curtain call for all terrestrial life. What’s not to be terrified by, of, for, about, your highness?

(The prepositions did their work. My lord and master has succumbed to slumber. I’ll live another day.)

Sean Singer’s nettlesome lyric tells the story it tells in the words it uses. Tell me it doesn’t. I see those words at each pass. What I’ve made of them is addled whimsy, of course, but not snide, and not mockery. The poem doesn’t need me; I need it. Reading poetry teaches me: Don’t lose your head. Be bold. Read it the high way, the low way, any way but loose. Just read it, let it look for, if not find, you; otherwise, your orange rind can’t fly out.

(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved