This next poem actually came to being in Arizona.
I was teaching at Arizona State and had
a wonderful group of students who were learning how to write.
And I was struggling through this poem
while they were also struggling through theirs.
It's called "Parsley."
And I really owe a debt of gratitude
to the student who worked in a pet store in Phoenix
and brought her pet parrot, or the parrot
they were training, to class so that we could study him.
There are two parts to this poem.
Each part has a title.
And I think that's all you need to know,
except that the main character in here
is General Rafael Trujillo, who was a dictator of the Dominican
Republic and had ordered, on a particular day
in October, 20,000 Haitian cane workers to be killed.
And the only way he could distinguish them
from the Dominican compatriots in working in the cane fields
was that they could not roll an R. "Parsley."
The cane fields.
There is a parrot imitating spring
in the palace, its feathers parsley green.
Out of the swamp, the cane appears to haunt us,
and we cut it down.
El General searches for a word.
He is all the world there is.
Like a parrot imitating spring, we
lie down screaming as rain punches through
and we come up green.
We cannot speak an R. Out of the swamp, the cane appears,
and then the mountain we call in whispers Katalina.
The children know their teeth to arrowheads.
There is a parrot imitating spring.
El General has found his word: perejil.
Who says it lives.
He laughs, teeth shining out of the swamp.
The cane appears in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming,
and we lie down.
For every drop of blood there is a parrot imitating spring.
Out of the swamp, the cane appears.
The palace.
The word the general's chosen is parsley.
It is fall.
When thoughts turn to love and death,
the general thinks of his mother, how
she died in the fall, and he planted her walking cane
at the grave and it flowered, each spring stolidly forming
four star blossoms.
The general pulls on his boots, he
stumps to her room in the palace, the one
without curtains, the one with a parrot in a brass ring.
As he paces, he wonders, who can I kill today?
And for a moment the little knot of screams is still.
The parrot who has traveled all the way
from Australia in an ivory cage is, coy as a widow,
practicing spring.
Ever since the morning, his mother collapsed in the kitchen
while baking skull shaped candies
for the Day of the Dead.
The general has hated sweets.
He orders pastries brought up for the bird.
They arrive dusted with sugar on a bed of lace.
The knot in his throat starts to twitch.
He sees his boots the first day in battle
splashed with mud and urine, as a soldier falls
at his feet amazed how stupid he looked
at the sound of artillery.
"I never thought it would sing," the soldiers said and died.
Now the general seeds the fields of sugar cane
lashed by rain and streaming.
He sees his mother's smile, the teeth gnawed to arrowheads.
He hears the Haitians sing without R's as they
swing the great machetes.
"Katalina," they sing.
"Katalina, mi madre, mi amol en muelte."
God knows his mother was no stupid woman.
She could roll an R like a queen.
Even a parent can roll an R. In the bare room,
the bright feathers arch in a parody of greenery
as the last pale crumbs disappear under the blackened
tongue.
Someone calls out his name in a voice
so like his mother's a startled tears splashes
the tip of his right boot.
My mother, my love in death.
The general remembers the tiny green sprigs men of his village
wore in their capes to honor the birth of a son.
He will order many this time to be killed
for a single beautiful word.
The real problem that I had with this poem.
And Dean had mentioned wanting to have truth.
The truth was there, and it was horrific.
And that was the major problem.
But there were minor truths that needed to be gotten to,
and one of them concerned that parrot,
whether there were in fact pure green parrots
the color of parsley.
And thanks to the student, I found out that there were,
and then I could proceed.