John Popielaski
Performative
It doesn’t seem possible that titmice chat
with one another over sunflower seeds
and ask, to pass the time, if you could be
any animal, what animal would you be.
When it’s this cold and the snow
has quieted the world down and the sun
is just about to disappear
behind the antisocial neighbor’s house,
I can’t imagine any titmouse wanting to be
anything other than me, the man inside
this house, the mensch who fills the birdbath
every morning, who disperses all the seed,
who always has a heated, well-lit habitat,
immune to scarcity and time and seasons.
I may have taken something altering this afternoon
that only now is kicking in,
but it could be that I have honed myself
to hear things all these windows
were designed to muffle or keep out.
What I am trying to convey to you,
whom I’m envisioning as skeptical,
is that I hear two titmice out there
in the middle of a juniper,
discussing how they deeply pity
my estrangements and dependencies.
I shut the heat off, kill the lights.
I pour a large beer and sit by the window
closest to the juniper. I open it
six inches. Cold air rushes in.
The titmice know I hear them now.
I’m stunned to hear that they know who Thoreau is.
They reflect on how the lot of us got started
with the same necessities,
but something happened at a haywire point
and it’s been nothing but divergence ever since.
I take my clothes off and transition
like a person from the tropics
whom a shaman has instructed
to embrace the boreal as soon as possible.
I lie down on the snow beneath the juniper
and start to shiver like a chickadee. Something tells me
in the titmice silence that they know
I’m only doing this because I know
that I can never be a bear.
Other work by John Popielaski