Said the Parakeet

B.D. was a decent poet but difficult to define or for himself to self-divine, a follower, a “gift” the way one seeker, loose but selective, identified himself to an intoxication reading obnubilating poems in a brick-and-river town: a generous, ecstatic overnight. A present, or an absence needing to be present, who tailed me, who mailed women years ago when he was free with his attention, a fixation that he felt attended him. Sometimes several times a week then several times a day he’d write me, for he was free to borrow books, go to the mailbox at 3 a.m., for it was urgent that he send a bride issue of Vogue,Bazaar, (not Seventeen, but Glamour, but not Ms.) from the Heartland where (Don’t forget our wedding date!) he bubble wrapped some trinkets, snapshots — poses of his parakeet beside his own long head meeting at an angle in a steely mirror. His wife, from her wheelchair, had made their camera flash. He tried to kill his wife with a little hammer