Cock o the Walk (photos)

Pele rarely stays still long enough for a portrait. He takes his job guarding the hens very seriously. He has several vocalizations: Juicy Food Here! Let's get laid, and Danger danger danger. The mangy bobcat nabbed some chickens. But not this year. The cock o the walk struts his stuff. Maybe we should call him Harry, or Hotspur. He has to carefully lift each leg over his own spur. Otherwise, he'd trip. The chickens have only each other to fear. Pecking order is the status quo.

Since the photo assignment was to focus "within walking distance." I took a rather laid-back approach and never left the hammock. As I lolled, I never before noticed that each chicken has a distinctive comb. Kind of like a fingerprint. Even their wattles are varied. Some are like dahlia petals. Others, like roses. 

My cousin once had a hen named Rosie who preferred to roost on the BBQ grill. She didn't get the joke. But her owner became a vegetarian. One hen has a deformed beak, don't let that fool you. She is savage when it comes to bugs and mice. But she is also the most personable. She listens intently when I croon to her. I speak imperfect cluck-cluck so she can't always make out the words. She always politely answers back.



The last bird is the same size and shape as a chicken but he is not a chicken. He is an impostor in death's clothing. I don't speak his language either. I am also not yet quite ripe enough. But he is extremely patient. Perhaps some day I will master his language. Hopefully, not too soon.

A Fowl Run-in with Mercury Retrograde

My Mercury Retrograde began a little early. Because of the BART strike, the roads were jammed—I was in Silicon Valley for a tech conference. Because traffic on Highway 280 to 92 was snarly as a hungry lion, I stopped off at the least exit in Foster City and bought a lovely Costco roast chicken, and waited out the worst of the traffic jam. 

Crossing the San Mateo Bridge under full moonlight was worth the wait—pure magic—platinum trail of moonlight on the indigo velvet of the bay. I thought I could see the after effects of the lunar eclipse, the moon looked a little lopsided on top. But I was imagining things. 

All was serene, it was as if I was inside a Maxfield Parrish painting. Hunter's Moon and eclipse. In the rearview mirror, the sunset was a dragon's blood glow, and Venus to the west, a beautymark. I was basking in all this glorious gloaming. Until an idiot in a SUV cut in front of me.

I stopped short, the chicken decided to fly the coop as if to get to the other side of the road. At least it didn't hit the window. The roasting pan lid popped off on the descent, and the damned chicken landed upside down inside my backpack and drooled on my brand-new skinny cuff jeans. 

They were the last pair in my size, and on sale for only $10. Costco pants rarely fit—I usually buy three pairs, keep one, return the others. In fact, that's why I was in Costco, to begin with—to return a pair of jeans. I really couldn't think of how I could possibly return these jeans smelling like a chicken roast-off. They'd better fit is all I can say.

Luckily I had a premonition beforehand and moved my gorgeous new purple and magenta silky down vest to the back seat. Apparently the premonition wasn't strong enough for me to consider putting the chicken on the floor of the car, shackled with snow chains, instead of in a shopping bag on the passenger's seat. Wish I had thought to move my cameras from the bottom of the bag as well. Nothing like chicken schmutz to lube the LCD screen. Of course, it completely missed the baby bagels.

So while driving with a greased gearshift, I grabbed the slippery sucker by a leg and shoved it back into the roasting pan and set it on the dashboard. Mopping up what mess I could reach with toilet paper, I felt like the lubricated inside of a BBQ basting pan.  

When I got home, I went to transfer that errant chicken back into bag. It leapt out of the roasting pan to take a roll all over my faux suede car seats, splashing chicken juice and fat into my eye and hair. And judging the look on Neil's face when I walked in the door—apparently I was modeling a Something About Mary coiffure. And how was your conference, dear?

Can I please have a pass? I already did my Mercury Retrograde time. Or was it full moon time? Oh, the car smells foul, the jeans do fit but they keep clucking and cats follow me wherever I go.

Up with the chickens, freewrite

Rising with the chickens is not exactly my cup of tea, nor is it within my parameters unless the night is long, and the craic is good and and the idea of bed is but a distant thought. Of course, when the moon is full, it tends to confuse the chickens who will cluck all night long, and lay eggs under the moonlight. The roosters are plum-tuckered out by daybreak, having nailed everything in sight for the past 24 hours. They stand on the fence and beat their wings, but can only manager rough croak, more like a toad than a fowl.

I met a Scottish dancer at the Clan Gun banquet who is studying avian science, nothing exotic like herons or snow snow egrets, but poultry science. She said she loves chickens. I like them fried and baked, barbecued, fricasseed, but not live beneath my window at night during a full moon. They nice enough to look at nestled in the trees weather in Key West where there’s a wild wayward chicken for every resident, or the wild jungle fowl that roam the streets on the backside of Kauai’i. With their brilliant feathers  they’re like exotic ornaments. I’m reminded that chickens came from China, so it is said, but it must’ve been a long time ago by way of the silk road because they’re central to so many cultures whether Roman, Celtic, or Mayan.

Once I had to take care of the neighbor’s chickens, we began with 40 chickens. but as the days passed, the flock grew smaller and smaller. The sly fox in the henhouse, such a cliché. It could’ve been a raccoon, I suppose. One moonlit night he polished off half the flock. The neighbors were distressed, having named all 40 of them. And when they returned home, they were only nine chickens left out of 40.

We always wanted to hypnotize the chickens, draw a circle and put their beak in the center, or flip them upside down and stroke their bellies—but catching them was the biggest challenge. We weren’t up to when they were all nearly as big as we were, and were not above chasing us or the dogs. Come daylight, they were fierce as tigers, but in the darkness they were sitting ducks.

Me, I liked slipping my hand beneath their feathers, to feel that promise and weight of eggs, warm to the touch, some eggs were the color of moonlight and others, the color of the sky, and some were speckled as if strewn with shade but the egg timer went off and that’s the end of this freewrite.

9/10/2004 Writers’ Group

CHICKEN SOUP

draft

    —for Ruth Stone

1. With my hands full of the dilemma unborn chicks

ready, but too weak to escape their smooth white prisons,

I have trouble undoing the henhouse gate—

itís like convoluted love mounting in the afternoon hammock

where the intensity of sex was equal the heat of the argument

and blinding orgasms forestalled the inevitable equation

leaving me to count days and eggs with an exhausted passion.

Seeking solace in the henhouse,

Iím confronted with the argument head-on.

Details become significant: minute pinfeathers,

like venial sins, fringe the broody hen's eyelids.

She croons; the chicks gather up courage from under her wings

to answer the four hatchlings I attempt to rescue.

With the precision of a surgeon, I carefully tweeze

a piece of shell from the membrane of a half-born chick,

a bright ruby wells up over wet yellow feathers.

I remember how Binty stood on her colt's umbilical cord

to stop the bleeding. The belabored desire of my breasts and belly

swell and point accusingly at the parched earth, wanting

to masturbate with death in the chickencoop.

I mid-wife the second embryo: a miracle—

a neck, longer than what I think is possible

uncoils snakelike, from the opened shell.

With trembling haunches and sealed eyelids,

the chick blindly slides from the shell into my hand.

A pale necklace of pinfeathers ring the tiny winglets.

I move the chick closer to the brood;

its loud call doesn't rouse the maternal instinct of the hen;

she distractedly pecks at it, and tramples it

in her hasty mothering to protect the others.

Poultry yard facts are not news,

but cruelly catches me by surprise anyway.

2. In restaurants, heat lamps to keep the chicken warm

reminded me too much of Mary Bianchi's incubator:

a fortress of blue doors and windows.

Easter: I crawled through fields of yellow chicks

blooming furiously at the speed of light under 30-watt bulbs

to find just the right one. Under the miracle of chickens,

unnamed possibility opened up like infinity.

I was so angry when my grandmother simply said No,

and the dream quietly closed in on itself;

a small child covered in sawdust

fiercely clutching a downy chick to her breast.

From the poultry yard we learned uneasy truths—

suicidal stampedes in pens with lethal corners,

pecking order, what blood-smell was capable of rousing.

We taught the survivors how to drink,

clipped beaks and wings. We learned euphemisms,

practiced what we learned in the school yard.

I took a squeamish clinical interest

in deveining drumsticks during Sunday dinners.

When things got tough, I retreated to the sanctity of illness.

Feeding me chicken soup, Grandma always explained,

You've got to boil it until the bone-jelly comes out.

Was it really the bones of the chicken

that healed us when we were sick?

3. As I struggle to save the final chicks,

you say to me, I believe in letting nature take its course.

The dog loves the ones that don't hatch out.

So, I place the tiny ember back in its nest

The wind to catch this spark will not blow.

Long shadows crawl over yellow madrone leaves

toward the empty hammock supplicated by the evening breeze.

I fishtail down the valley; my rage and headlights flirt and neck

with the center line of the long highway toward home:

how many accidents are born in the aftermath of lover's quarrels?

This time we were lucky (or, unlucky, as it seems).

4. Your postcard arrives: Another chick hatched out;

it made me think of you. We shouldn't make a go of it.

I think of how cold bone-jelly quivered like a wild trout

in my grandmother's capable hands.

You didn't see how the chickís blood rusted

like a stigmata on my palms and thighs

during the hot summer heat.

1985?

rev. 8/13/ 87 rev. 2/ 93  still not there...
Humboldt County
& Napa
another version was published in Kamel Klaxon 1985
the first draft may have been written in 1984.