Birds love sound more than they love food. If scientists could harness and utilize the sonic energy produced by a single parakeet, all the working oil rigs could be unplugged and turned into coral beds. A happy bird is a chattering bird. To host these little auctioneers in your house is to be made aware of silence's palpability: it's not some empty vessel waiting to be filled, but a real thing with heat and a heartbeat in which sound waits like an unread book. It's its own aqua vibrating ache. Left dormant and untilled by parrots, silence is a sound sadder and louder than any song.
Of the Parrat and Other Birds that Can Speake by Nick Lantz
It is
for certain knowne that they have died
for
very anger and griefe that they could not
learn
to pronounce some hard words.
—Pliny the Elder
When you
buy the bird for your mother
you hope it
will talk to her. But weeks pass
before it
does anything except pluck the bars
with its
beak. Then one day it says, “infect.”
tells you this on the phone,
and you
drive over, find the frozen meals
you bought
for her last week sweating
on the
countertop. “In fact,” she says
in answer
to your question, “I have been
eating,”
and it’s as you point to the empty
trash can,
the spotless dishes, that you
realize the
bird is only saying, “in fact,”
that this
is now the preamble to all
of your
mother’s lies. “In fact,” she says,
“I have
been paying the bills,” and you
believe her
until you find a cache
of unopened
envelopes in the freezer.
More things
are showing up where
they
shouldn’t. Looking out the back
window one
evening you see craters
in her
yard. While she’s watching TV,
you go out
with a trowel and excavate
picture
frames, flatware that looks like
the silver
bones of some exquisite
animal. You
worry when you arrive
one day and
see the open, empty cage
that you
will find the bird dead, stuffed
in an oven
mitt and left in a drawer,
but you
find it sitting on her shoulder
in the
kitchen. “In fact,” she says,
“he learned
to open the cage himself.”
The bird
learns new words. You learn
which lies
you can ignore. The stroke
that kills
her gives no warning, not—
the doctor
assures you—that anyone
can predict
such things. When you
drive home
that night with the cage
belted into
the passenger seat, the bird
makes a
sound that is not a word
but that
you immediately recognize
as the
sound of your mother’s phone
ringing,
and you know it is the sound
of you
calling her again and again,
the sound
of her not answering.
Nick Lantz is the author of two books: We Don't Know We Don't Know
(Graywolf Press) and The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors' House
(University of Wisconsin Press). He is a former Jay C. and Ruth Halls
Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and is
the current Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College.