Bird-Millie
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Since December, she's started flollolting fantastical tales
which seem to be the fulfillment of living dreams,
where every weird and wild thing is Delphic.
Millie has become the leaves whispering in our trees.
If we shush ourselves and listen close, we can hear
all the sublime oracles we ever wanted to hear,
like Greeks enthralled by doves' calling in the Sibylline oaks.
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I suppose that all of us are prone to listen
only to the syllables within our own ears,
the ever-altering invention of our personal language.
Human words are just as full of oracles as bird words,
if we fwurble them loudly and eloquently enough,
but people seldom listen to us that way.
Bystanders quickly angle their heads to hear,
intrigued and momentarily alert,
then angle quizzically off the other way.
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One day I'll mull it over, making the change myself.
I could do the same calls Millie does; and perhaps it's true,
as she dlolled to me in June when we pruned the lilacs,
perhaps there really is a small and lovely phoenix in my ear.
Our little Millie slipped over into bird language
late last year, early December. Permanently, we think.
She had delayed for quite a long time--stalled, really--
chilloling her way through months of rehearsal,
gradually replacing her regular laughter and songs
with twittles, churbleries and bweaklie-bweaklies.
(Dont mind me. Ill never spell them right.)
Now she hrrurbles continual mwyeklils and sveeblefols,
except that for a few words she has developed signals,
evolving simple gestures to display her moods.
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Well, at the Oleksaks' annual Christmas party
everybody always likes to sing four-part carols,
and there, totally in bird-talk, she delighted us all,
arriving in the costume of an oriental philosopher,
just as Mozart did at one florid candlelit soiree,
operatically handing out multiple broadsheets:
Excerpts from the Broken Fragments of Zoroaster,
printed with eleven portentous riddles and eleven proverbs:
Nature rears herself on the back of the goddess.
Find a barbarous nickname and do not change it.
The truth is out there, stuffed in the garbage.
Things like that, but she twliltered all the time. Acted silly,
daring us to decode her world of warbles.
Millie was born the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour,
so Al and I always expected peculiar things.