Pistachio’s Solo
The first sound of the yearis not, as it turns out, a bell
or a kiss or the soft click
of resolutions being made,
but Pistachio,
my wife’s cockatiel,
producing the same three notes
she has been producing
since the Biden administration.
She has learned, in all that time,
absolutely nothing.
Not a convincing wolf whistle,
not the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth,
not the small electronic chime
my phone makes
when something the world
has decided is important
has happened.
She has, however,
mastered her three notes
to a degree
that suggests she considers them
sufficient.
And yet, this morning,
half asleep,
I could swear
I hear the notifications
inside her chirping,
tucked between the second note
and the third
like a secret message
the bird is hiding from my wife
and delivering only to me.
This is, of course,
not happening.
This is my brain
doing what my brain does now,
which is to find the phone
in everything,
even the bird,
even the silence
the bird leaves
between her notes.
I swipe at the screen anyway.
Snooze. Dismiss. Clear.
The pings I have invented
keep arriving,
and Pistachio bobs along,
indifferent,
performing the only song
she has ever known
or felt the need to learn.
Somewhere in the swipe and the chirp
I half fall back asleep,
and there she is on a stage,
on the conductor’s shoulder,
suddenly fluent,
suddenly capable
of every song
she has refused to learn
in waking life.
The strings hold their breath.
The kettle drum prepares
like a man at a bar
waiting to say something bigger and better
but trying to be polite.
She delivers a solo
of unbelievable complexity,
and I understand, in the dream,
that she has known how
the entire time,
and simply did not feel
that any of us
had earned it.
Then she is on my shoulder,
warm, impossibly light,
leaning toward my ear
to whisper something
I cannot quite catch
over the piccolo,
though I know,
the way you know in dreams,
that it is a small unkindness
about the year ahead
and my likely role in it.
When I look down,
the phone is in my lap,
fully present, blooming,
a beady black unblinking eye
in the center of the screen,
already, somehow,
certain
of how
I am going to spend
this one.
And Pistachio,
back in the kitchen,
back to her usual repertoire,
chirps her three notes
into a room
that has, at last,
stopped pretending
they were anything else.