1.

I dreamt of you again last night,
my lemony Indian Ringneck.
From reservoirs, unrealized selves rose,
forgotten presences
more fitting ways of
being
on this Earth.


We seek an entry point....

One of Van Gough's paintings
had a hacked-off bottom
because museum curators determined to make it
fit a wall.
Now its characters appear
to be falling off of the bottom edge.

My yellow bird and I, were both pulled from
the nest, while yet
in embryonic consciousness;

ripped out of a frame that held together
puzzles of our unlived lives.

Our bodies were skewed and falsified
accommodating walls not our own, so that
we seem to topple out of peoples lives and places.

You forgot your native song, imitate
humans, whining dogs, while I forgot my lineage, say uncool things in public.



Yet Happy as ever to join worlds,
you came forth from isolation, waddling
with your ankles almost collapsed
from baby malnutrition.

[Other nights I fall asleep wondering how I can support myself, and dream that my knees are collapsing.]

While you seem half-cocked,
waddling along willy-nilly and slowly,
your long tail sweeping the floor
We laugh and call you "Waltzing Matilda".

[I too am misfit. At work, hung over from sugar and caffeine, A co-worker eyes me cocks her head, and asks if I’m high.]



2.

It is said that you Ringnecks don't bond.
Is it because you take on different mates unlike the others who pair for life?
Do you simply reject bondage?
[Would they say that a Nun or a Yogi can’t bond?]

Full of contradictions, the one we call "Blond Bimbo", you are the one I take to bed when my heart is laden and my thoughts become earthbound.
.
It is always you of whom I dream, my buttercup, so bright, so untenable, yet as tender as any I've tamed.
Yet you've tamed me.
Like a man, I'd claimed that I didn't need you at all, could sell or trade you tomorrow because I was not attached to you in the same way I was to the others.

But the other Ringnecks, both males, flew away.
Now you have lost or abandoned three mates to the wind and the illusion of summers. Lost to the irresistible green heights, which apparently imbue you all with new flight feathers.
How is it that you Asians who could reach no heights indoors but only hop or flutter to the floor, suddenly flew, when we held you outdoors?
Was it the songs yet unsung in your pulsing breasts that imbued you with such lightness as to lift you out of our tight love?
I'd retrieved you as I'd done in the pet shop when the whites of your eyes had turned red from stress, looking haggard although still a baby.
You spoke with your eyes such relief.

You are the one the only one who sleeps all night cuddled in the crook of my neck when I am not willing to contain my hurting, can receive no more comfort from humans.

You are the one who loves me tenaciously and yet with exquisite subtlety.
You slip right though the veil into my dreams as softly lapping broken waves upon the shore of my consciousness, washing over and healing me, surrounding me with your golden innocence, saying to me that it's OK to be imperfect, be vulnerable.
You make slight flap flapping sounds with your wings, contentment in the privileged dark. I dreamt you were in caged with bigger birds who could have hurt you but who chose not to. Like me, in Man's World.
I keep trying to bring you home, but I’m hampered by reservations and doubts about how to care for you properly.
I offer to take you home, to extracise you from oppressive demands
walk straight, eat right, forget the lightness of your phantom flight feathers.

The dream unfinished
clutter would make me forget you
Yet you call me forth from this heaviness,
this insistence on accommodating frames that don't fit.

You are a winged spirit shining within the caged memories of a body
that desires return to the flock t
transplanted in a foreign land, now home.