THE DAINTY MONSTERS
Michael
Ondaatje
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Henri Rousseau and Friends
for Bill Muysson
In his clean vegetation
the parrot, judicious,
poses on a branch.
The narrator of the scene,
aware of the perfect fruits,
the white and blue flowers,
the snake with an ear for music;
he presides.
The apes
hold their oranges like skulls,
like chalices.
They are below the parrot
above the oranges—
a jungle serfdom which
with this order
reposes.
They are the ideals of dreams.
Among the exactness,
the symmetrical petals,
the efficiently flying angels,
there is complete liberation.
The parrot is interchangeable;
tomorrow in its place
a waltzing man and tiger,
brash legs of a bird.
Greatness achieved
they loll among textbook flowers
and in this pose hang
scattered like pearls
in just as intense a society.
On Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot’s walls,
with Lillie P. Bliss in New York.
And there too
in spangled wrists and elbows
and grand façades of cocktails
are vulgarly beautiful parrots, appalled lions,
the beautiful and the forceful locked in suns,
and the slight, careful stepping birds.
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