Why We Have Turkeys

Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
 

A lot of things sucked in the 1800s, but literature wasn’t one of them. There was this book by a young woman, Mary Shelley. There was “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”—not technically from the 1800s, true, but 1798 seems close enough. And of course the Americans: Walt Whitman (hallelujah), and Hawthorne (not funny like Flannery O’Connor, but, like O’Connor, the guy knew his way around an allegory), and Poe (still so weirdly timely. I mean, remember last March when Captain Red Hat was talking about the coronavirus while in the company of rich friends hanging out at Mar-a-Lago? If that didn’t remind people of “The Masque of the Red Death,” then I don’t know).

Dickinson; check.

Stephen Crane; you said it.

And this anonymous suicide note in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations—see if it doesn’t distill the Victorian era at least as well as Oscar Wilde: “All this buttoning and unbuttoning.” I read that when I was 17, and I’ve never forgotten.

Poetry wants that exactness and impact, too. And April—National Poetry Month—isn’t too far behind us in the rearview mirror, so here’s a poem. It’s not as chiseled, I know, as “Ozymandias.” Not as whipcrack as Emily Dickinson. But maybe it’s not without its own weird merits anyway:
 

Why We Have Turkeys

For the record, turkeys don’t gobble.
It’s more like a squeaky hinge on a gate

in a wind
that won’t stop blowing—

greee-awk, yeee-awk, greee-awk,
yeee-awk, all around the neighborhood—

my neighbor keeps two in his yard,
and no one knows why.

It could be the sound of belching
after swallowing a bugle.

Or the sounds
this planet didn’t want

got thrown away, and turkeys
are the microphone they landed on.

Maybe each day
can be a microphone too,

and the house out of place
is your own house.

Your thoughts seem more like habit?
Have a turkey.

You haven’t felt wind in your feathers all week?
Here’s a bird.