Fathom

Tropical birds removed from the wild experience trauma, at minimum, twice: once, when taken from their bonded families, and again, if they outlive, as frequently, their human owners.

“Owners,” with whom they have little choice but to bond, unless they choose to die. It must be instinct, to bond with the hand that feeds you, when you cannot feed yourself. Instinct, to love the hand that rolls your cage into a closet, to imitate a night.

Though a parrot can always protest, scatter pellets, agonized, squawk.

I witnessed as much at an ex’s parents’ house when the parrot would not silence over dinner.

As his father rolled the parrot’s cage into the closet and shut the door, I stared at my hands.

Unimaginable, I thought, he has closed an animal from the rainforest inside a closet.

And with the unimaginable now between us, we were ready not to talk.

* * *

Before the parrot was shut beside the winter coats, I noticed her beak was not like a comma, but a hollow incisor. 

After the parrot was shut beside the winter coats, I learned that parrots are smuggled across borders in toilet-paper rolls and toothpaste tubes. 

If you are having trouble, like me, imagining how even a small or baby parrot can fit inside a toothpaste tube, you will also likely not be surprised that only one in six survive transport, meaning, each abducted parrot is also insurance, against the majority that will die. 

In the morning at the ex’s parents’, the parrot was rolled back out into the kitchen to eat pineapple and watch the news.

“The longest of many units derived from an anatomical measurement, the fathom originated as the distance from the middle fingertip of one hand to the middle fingertip of the other hand of a large man holding his arms fully extended.”

It was December, St. Augustine, we drove toward the coast’s stretched gray sky. I pushed my face toward waves, eager to breathe whatever the wild, and recalled a line I loved by Robert Hass, about a woman who has crafted the perfect dinner party, who, while guests murmur, spooning elegance, finds herself “in darkness / crying.” I couldn’t claim to know such glamour, but understood at least as much as Hass’s line that I scratched in the sand with a stick, 

she didn’t know what she wanted,  

higher than the tide, to prolong its erasure. 

The ex- photographed my scrawl, of what one imagined woman felt, and presented it as his. 

I am not saying anyone “owns” the sand or wanting. 

And I am not saying my life was like the parrot’s, shoved inside the coat closet when her needs became overwhelming. 

And I allow that, perhaps, the parrot might’ve preferred the respite company of darkness and coats, the smell of mildewed fabric. 

I am not even saying this or that about an ex-, twenty years my senior, or how dumb I was to pretend things were remotely working out. 

But later as I sat politely watching afternoon TV, with my socked feet on the thick carpet in the dry baseboard heat, so close to the ocean, 

I think the parrot knew what she wanted.

Author’s notes

The definition for “fathom” is from Britannica Online Dictionary.
 “She didn’t know what she wanted” is a line from Robert Hass’s poem, “The Feast,” from his 1979 book, Praise, published by Ecco Press.

Meg Shevenock's poetry book, The Miraculous, Sometimes, was selected by Bob Hicok as winner of the 2019 Marystina Santiestevan first book prize for Conduit Books & Ephemera. Additionally, her poems and essays have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Lana Turner, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Best New Poets, the Kenyon Review blog, and elsewhere.

Published July 15 2024