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Nothing is ever finished
On the night of her breakthrough performance,
the peahen’s body put her through the usual sequence
of reminders that it doesn’t like going onstage:
the need to hyperventilate, multiple trips to the bathroom,
compulsion to eat every seed in sight. Her anxiety grew so violent
she wanted to stop the drumming, stop the others from dancing.
But fame did not spoil the peahen,
nor did it cause her to desert her old friends.
The peahen staggered and walked on, always following what she assumed
to be a path, and after a long while came upon a second crematorium.
The path back to the first crematorium crunched underfoot.
But the peahen, drunken, threw her head back,
tossing her soaked feathers: her eyes dripped pearls.
And sometimes a feeling of unbearable sadness ran through her:
she would think of the others, of all those who had already gone through
the crematoria, all those birds whom death had swallowed up.
Every day for a year the peahen climbed the long, cold stairs
up the second crematorium tower and stared at smoke and ash.
She memorized the way the sunlight looked at noon.
Then she walked down the hill to the center of town,
past the church with its wide doors open so that she could see
the piles of cats and dogs straying in and out.
In prison she had dreamed about cats and dogs like these.
In the church courtyard an old human woman is standing
holding a clock in her hands. The peahen walks through,
stops and asks her “What time is it?”
“Have a look.” the old woman says to the peahen.
The peahen looks and sees that there are no hands on the clock.
Here the peahen got angry. This is a state of war, the peahen realized,
between herself and the humans who had built these crematoria.
The peahen walked on without looking again behind her
at the battered body lying on the side of the road
victory, with or without a bomb, would take care of itself.
The humans were doomed. It was only a matter of time.
The orchestra at the corner of the road were dressed as skeletons,
The peahen lost herself in spinning frenzy. When the music stopped,
one could hear the dry shots of the hunters and the clay pigeons
falling behind the cardboard walls. Wherever there are humans death is near.
Looking out of the pearls she saw a lake of fire.
Is the peahen still alive? We cannot know for certain.
We remain in hope. Shortly after this mention of hope,
while she sleeps in the sand and her gentleman friend
gently pours sand on her body, the only mention of the title
of the poem appears: nothing is ever finished. |
