– Feral Parrots
I am reading a story called ‘What We Lost’ about buildings that burned in Los Angeles – it marks a month since the outbreak of the worst wildfires in their history / I am reading a line that talks about feral parrots: ‘They’re not native to the area, but decades ago they either escaped or were let loose by owners, and now they’ve become free, wild parrots’ / The writer describes sitting outside the Palisades Starbucks on the patio and a screaming flock flying over his head / He says it was so loud it’s like they were pulling the finger and vocalising: “hey, we’re free” / Something about the image of feral parrots with red feathers laughing in the sky makes me cry.
Further down in the piece someone talks about a stretch of coastline dotted with houses that block the sea, but every so often, a dramatic break appears and the ocean opens up / He says: ‘..suddenly you see how close you are to it, until it quickly closes again as the little homes continue / That feeling of compression and expansion will always stay with me’ / That image also makes me cry.
One woman talks about a pizza place in the San Gabriel Valley with picnic tables in the carpark / She says the restaurant created the fabric of the town / In the news there are photos of the charred, twisted remains of buildings, row after row; scorched trees; flickering traffic lights stuck on one colour / It’s not the images of a scarred city and its burned debris that make me cry, though of course that is sad / It’s the way people describe things, the way we only seem to be able to describe the significance of these things after they are gone – as if we all gain a magical brief ability to become poets / When else would we sit down to record our feelings about feral parrots and car park picnic tables / It’s a shame that our talent for noticing impermanence is usually prompted by mourning / (Grief forces specificity).
My own grief has split me open / I am wondering if a split heart continues to absorb everything it sees (and leak out everything it feels) forever / But if all my life turns out to be is a wash of colour as birds fly over my head and the flash of burned debris seen from a car, I won't be upset / All I ask is that I might gain that magical ability to become a poet while I am living through it, even if nothing is ever written down and the words are only strung together in my head.