The Me of Us

SUSAN E. WADDS

We were like those birds—the male who ruffles his blinding blue plumage and sets down a silky filament or a tuft of fox hair and does a dance so fantastic who wouldn’t swoon, where she, intent on some sad grub, goes on pecking. I’ll get that grub for you, says he with a flutter and lays that morsel at her fine feet which are already hop hopping to the end of the branch. Or perhaps we were like those long begging creatures with tendril antennae—she who says, come in, let’s make a home here with our sweet coupling, and he swoons and prays and loses himself in her gorgeous green places while she chews, her mandible jaws opening and closing, opening and closing, on his great green head which is no longer needed but to feed the young she refuses to bear.