Poem a day 2015: 8

Fish and Birds

In that house on Elmer Street, as the sixties

slid into the seventies, our pets could not be

touched.  Cold blooded animals, close to the start

of the evolutionary chain, they swam to and fro

in bubbling tanks, through purple seaweed

over whitish decorative rocks,

waving chewed tails like flags,

languid in their glass prison.

The fat guppies regularly spit out

clouds of babies,

which they and the angelfish --

open mouthed and wide eyed --

probably ate.

Neon tetras zigged and zagged, fluorescent

arrows

through herds of nameless silver fish,

while the Siamese fighting fish (male)

dangled mute

in his separate tank, dark blue turning

black,

observing us with

prehistoric hatred

through the scratched plastic.

These were Dad’s animals, and he tended them

with clinical affection,

cleaning their aquariums

til the glass glowed,

moving them from one tank to another,

replacing them as they floated to the top.

We wanted mammals -- dogs or cats, hamsters,

rats -- furry beasts with palpable beating hearts.

Dad’s concession was a blue and white parakeet,

Bill, who sharpened his beak on a cuttlebone,

who chirped and shrieked in the kitchen,

scattering seeds and droppings on his slab

of old newspaper,

whose heart beat wild

when in our enthusiasm for touch

we reached chubby fingers into his cage.

It wasn’t long before Bill died,

turned up one morning stiff as a comma

on last month’s news, claws

curled around nothing,

eyes wide.

Dad theorized that our bedroom,

cold by the window

where the wind wormed through the old wood,

did the deed,

but perhaps we killed him with our fevered and

childish need for petting,

or that house, so long steeped in

antiseptic waters, filled with

the exhalations of those glass prisons,

couldn’t support a

touchable beast.