Waking The Angel

One jolt, and he’s upright, near wakeful, and lurching from that same dream
of parrots flaming over the cold moraines, finials of canopy, and vales
of other-worldly sadness. Seconds expire when he and this vision alone
are all that exist. Then the fiction darkens, only a far-off car alarm left
to ponder. Sometimes, to calm him, I’ll sit up as well, my arm like a wing
brooding across his shoulders, then tell him where he is, ask him if he’s sick.

This, we know, is a relative term (some hours more fickle with pain). The last six
empty months we have grieved, even in our sleep, to fix this damaged dream.
She has died, Pionus senilis, after a lengthy, staggering illness, owing
to systemic aspergillosis. This quietly ravaged her lungs with a veil
of fungus, which burgeoned until every other organ withered—inevitable if left
undiagnosed for as long as that. And how antiseptic, to think along

such lines; to disinfect the qualities and charms that rendered her a lone
four-year-old, and gave that wasted bit of life some meaning. No forensic
dispassion could ever undo those mornings when, seeds in tote, before we’d lift
the threadbare blankets covering our angel, we’d hear her through their dreamy
artificial dusk, querying our presence with a few syllables of greeting, veiled
and garbled; once freed, she would climb up, ill-tempered, stretch the pinioned wing

which could sanguine both ceiling and shirt with its blood feathers; and next, swing
forward, befuddled, to be lifted up, kissed, walked, then settled again into a cyclone
of seed husks and nutshells. But like a child who thinks on life’s brevity, fails
to grasp it, then one day, does, and finds it in her breath, she slipped into the sick
repose of the dying. And he, too, very near death then, sobbed into fever dreams,
vomited foam, and soaked the terry towels with sweat, while, wheezing to his left,

in her corner: a needled breastbone and lump of feathers patchy from surgeries that left
wine-stains of iodine, stitched with scabs she’d pluck from the downy under-wing;
her eye leering below a waxy lid as he fumbled with his urinal. And this pipe dream—
that she’d preen again her gory plumage, that he’d soon quit his tumult—I left alone.
This, the doomed condition: that she must choose to live awhile longer, for his sake,
if only that he would heal enough to see her yield. And to this secret end I availed

new routines: squeezing out cold flannels, rushing ice-packs when his nausea prevailed;
swelling her improvised tent sibilant with oxygen; swabbing out his pale, left
putrefied with the aspic of his stomach; urging from her the droplets of fungal sick
that sputtered through her ceres to my cheek when I flapped her exhausted wings.
Until, one day, he arose well enough, and she, at dawn, cradled her cap into the loom
of my hand, and finished it. How, then, to seek out grace but in the breach of his dream

where he may swag his hand into the cleft, then fold down again, homesick
for her stunted wing? Each of his gasps alighting my neck must be a lone
shiver of failed flight; each, her veiled flutter, breathing into our separate dreams. 

© Karl J. Sherlock