Two Pigeons

They’ve perched for hours on that window-ledge, scarcely moving. Beak to beak, a matched set, they differ almost imperceptibly— like salt and pepper shakers. It’s an event when they tuck (simultaneously) their pinpoint heads into lavender vests of fat. But reminiscent of clock hands blandly turning because they must have turned—somehow, they’ve taken on the grave, small-eyed aspect of monks hooded in conferences so intimate nothing need be said. If some are chuckling in the park, earning their bread, these are content to let the dark engulf them— it’s all the human imagination can fathom, how single-mindedly mindless two silhouettes stand in a window thick as milk glass. They appear never to have fed on anything else when they stir all of a sudden to peck savagely, for love or hygiene, at the grimy feathers of the other; but when they resume their places, the shift is one only a painter or a barber (prodding a chin back into position) would be likely to notice.