Free
Steven Ray Smith
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You were a baby on the day I met you,
and also not, because you had lived
already, alone and for yourself already, somewhere
invisible to me that I could never visit.
But because you didn’t know how to hunt or to hide
from those hunting you, I created my love
for you by setting your place and waving my
stick at the many different teeth
that roam the nights. And I called to you
with the name I named you.
As I go into the trees, the old ones and crowded saplings,
I’m sure I hear your voice among the voices of others.
I say your name, and I say it again and again.
It sounds simply that I am inviting you back
to the safe table. But really, I am looking
into that place I did not know about you.
There is no name for it, other that it’s your place.
When I call your name, I know I am calling
out a name that was always mine. And I hope
you know, your name is only the first of my two hopes.
The second is that you love your own place
as much as me. Or to be honest, the reverse.
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Exotic
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Her tail was from a different story
than the airways between our trees.
Taillight red, bright at noon, bright at dusk,
the tail startled us with its difference,
so we felt it must have something to do with us.
Because our eyes tugged at its luminescence,
we naturalized it in our vision.
We brought her inside and looked at her
for twenty years and invited visitors to look at her.
We gave her a purpose: to be looked at.
Our eyes had never experienced a finer epitome
of the color red. And when she at last dropped off her perch,
we saved her tail feathers and pinned them in a frame.
But on the blank plate, we had no notion what to engrave.
And that is when we realized the birdspeak,
the distracting chatter — ungluable and unmountable —
had been her calling out her name.
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Parrot
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My parrot does a lot of squawking
about the red hawk that impressed him
or scared him from a half-mile high.
He talks like the hawk all day,
repeating its warning.
Sometimes I say to him:
you know, it’s not the real you.
He’s heard me say it enough, so he says:
you know, it’s not the real you.
I wish I believed I were a hawk.
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Dedication
I had Hopkins about 10 years ago but he flew off in December, leaving my other parrot (“Tully”) alone now. I need to find her a new companion because she is alone. I hope Hopkins has found his best life as a free bird.
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Steven Ray Smith is the author of A Two Minute Forty Second Night (FutureCycle Press, 2022). The book was shortlisted for the Steel Toe Book Award in 2020. His poetry has been published in Verse Daily, The Yale Review, Southwest Review, The Kenyon Review, Barrow Street, Poet Lore, The Hollins Critic and others. More information about his work can be found at StevenRaySmith.com.
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Posted in Boudin April '24 Pet and tagged in #boudin, #poetry