The dirty word hops in the cage of the mind like the
Pondicherry vulture, stomping with its heavy left claw on
the sweet meat of the brain and tearing it with its vicious
beak, ripping and chopping the flesh. Terrified, the small
boy bears the big bird of the dirty word into the house, and
grunting, puffing, carries it up the stairs to his own room
in the skull. Bits of black feather cling to his clothes and
his hair as he locks the staring creature in the dark closet.
All day the small boy returns to the closet to examine
and feed the bird, to caress and kick the bird, that now
snaps and flaps its wings savagely whenever the door is
opened. How the boy trembles and delights at the sight
of the white excrement of the bird! How the bird leaps
and rushes against the walls of the skull, trying to escape
from the zoo of the vocabulary! How wildly snaps the
sweet meat of the brain in its rage.
· And the bird outlives the man, being freed at the man’s
death-funeral by a word from the rabbi.
But I one morning went upstairs and opened the door
and entered the closet and found in the cage of my mind
the great bird dead. Softly I wept it and softly removed
it and softly buried the body of the bird in the hollyhock
garden of the house I lived in twenty years before. And
out of the worn black feathers of the wing have I made
these pens to write these elegies, for I have outlived the
bird, and I have murdered it in my early manhood.
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