March 25, 2015
“Oh, your poetry,” a reader wrote to me recently. “Your pastoral musing, your innocence of nature.”
Fie on poetry. As a character in my short story “The Stalker” observes: “It is all sex.” And that rhymes with “vex,” which leads to “concupiscent” which rhymes with “nuisance” (not really: poetic license, but you get my drift) which means, “Sweet birds of youth! Knock it off!
Two days ago, I’m motoring up the driveway when I see a wounded starling rolling in the gravel. Oh no, I think, I have to put the poor thing out of its misery. I climb out of the car preparing myself to bash a bird brain. And then the one becomes two—two starlings clenched in a ball and, uh, doing it. The male rides on top and curses at me: “Old man! Get the eff away from me and my girlfriend!” And to his girl: “Don’t stop, don’t stop!”
I back away. I’m a guy—no guy every wants to horn in on another guy’s action. But the female starts shrieking like a girl. It’s over for her. She tosses her hapless guy into my neighbor Irene’s yard and waddles up to Clifton Terrace Road. The guy is rolling around calling, “Yo, Adrian! I love youse! Noooooooo!”
He rises into the air flapping his wings with ferocity and poops vigorously on my windshield. Adrian flies into the woods. There is nothing more pathetic than a blackbird with blue balls.
“I’m sorry,” I call out.
A few days ago I noted that a pair of housefinches had taken to sleeping on the tops of the support beams which hold up the eave over my front porch. The scarlet-headed male would perch on the left support and his girl on the right. And they would sing to the sunset. And Scout the Cat would watch out the window from the back of the love seat and clack her teeth and do epee moves with her whiskers.
Tonight (‘tonight won’t be just any night’) a gentle rain falls and Scout is asleep and there is no finch song and I look out through the front door curtain and there is the girlfriend on her perch but the guy is nowhere to be seen—
OMG. The guy is underneath the girl and she raises her butt and—
Scout is not only awake, she is watching the action and she keeps glancing at me, like “Thanks for fixing me, Gene.” She has always called me Daddy before but now she’s a horny bitch watching finch porn. For twenty minutes. What the eff?
My little scarlet tenor is yelling, “Eff me, baby, eff me!” And his petite girl is panting and screaming, “Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” And when it’s over, they smoke cigarettes and smirk at me.
And suddenly the entire forest is a brothel and big bird and mid-size birds and little birds are humping their heinies off screaming French words and whole passages from D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” while I try to explain sex to a cat.
As for me, I’m just a harmless old man who looks at Lululemon panted-girls but can’t do anything about it and why are the women my age so old? Where is MY, “Eff me, baby, eff me?” Yo! Adrian!
Attention all birds in my yard: ‘Get thee to a nunnery.’
