A squabble of branches overhead,
as if birds hadn’t got the hang of the trees yet,
resolves itself into a perfect arc,
a flashing locus of nightclub lime,

and the parakeet is in the next tree,
reassembling itself from the elbows out,
brandishing its ruby choker,
the gaudy anti-sparrow, the pirate’s familiar,
the preening princeling of the poopdeck,
so un-English it’s downright London.

Two toes forwards, two toes back,
it contains all its earlier drafts,
like an obsessively unfinished poem:

the last common ancestor of parakeet and duck,
surreptitiously dabbling in the shadows of dragons;

of parakeet and crocodile,
jewel-skinned whiptail,
sloping round the prehistoric pot plants;

of parakeet and monkey,
a toad-necked skulker,
sighing over its leathery eggs and dreaming,
in its black swamp, of its various children,
stowed on ramshackle galleons
or studying one another in sunlit surprise
in a future Kensington.

And instantly there’s a whole flock,
pure mathematics across the sky,
pure vandalism in the foliage,
braying like betrayal,
blithely pivoting wingtips around
the wild blunders of history.

© Will Holloway 2010