Correction Paroles The Language of the Birds par Richard Siken

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Paroles

1
A man saw a bird and found him beautiful. The bird had a song inside him, and
feathers. Sometimes the man felt like the bird and sometimes the man felt like a
stone--solid, inevitable--but mostly he felt like a bird, or that there was a bird in-
side him, or that something inside him was like a bird fluttering. This went on for a
long time.
2
A man saw a bird and wanted to paint it. The problem, if there was one, was simply
a problem with the questions. Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how,
because hows are easy--series of sequence, one foot after the other--but existen-
tially why bother, what does it solve?

And just because you want to paint a bird, do actually paint a bird, it doesn't mean
you've accomplished anything. Who gets to measure the distance between expe-
rience and its representation? Who controls the lines of inquiry? We do. Anyone
can.

Blackbird , he says. So be it, indexed and normative. But it isn't a bird, it's a man in
a bird suit, blue shoulders instead of feathers, because he isn't looking at a bird,
real bird, as he paints, he is looking at his heart, which is impossible.

Unless his heart is a metaphor for his head, as everything is a metaphor for itself,
so that looking at the paint is like looking at a bird that isn't there, with a song in its
throat that you don't want to hear but you paint anyway.

The hand is a voice that can sing what the voice will not, and the hand wants to do
something useful. Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, I think about a
poem I might write, someday, about my heart, says the heart.
3
They looked at the animals. They looked at the walls of the cave. This is earlier,
these are different men. They painted in torchlight: red mostly, sometimes black--
mammoth, lion, horse, bear--things on a wall, in profile or superimposed, dy-
namic and alert.

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