Penrhyn Stanlaws, Autumn, 1907
Color print 31 x 23 cm
Digital image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Once we glimpsed her through the basement window
as she loaded gray towels into the old washing machine,
and standing atop her head was an African parakeet, just like that,
plain and ordinary as the afternoon, its red-ringed eyes focussed
on nothing in particular, just a green creature rising and dipping
with the action of her back. Its bright green feathers matched
the brightness of the single housecoat she always wore
when not at work, a brightness incongruent with her voice,
her face, her furtive, mouse-like movements. Her husband
was not a man of great intelligence or kindness—though he loved
his bees and his Labrador despite the choke collar. He was cheap
and petty and probably threatened her, a sad woman and paranoid
to the point of sickness, a woman who muttered to the lilac,
stroked the grass, demanded exactitude from every knob
and nozzle in the house. All this I know not as her intimate
but as her adjacent, a place from which I also know
there was no one to inherit that coat, that parakeet.