I wasn’t wearing my glasses; I often don’t on walks,
since their absence only improves the morning,
turning everything into a pleasant dappled blur,
as on this morning, when I mistook
a half-full bottle of Pepsi littered on the
side of a shady road for a dead bird, thinking the
dark brown of the flat soda to be a grounded belly,
mistaking the dew that had accumulated in fat drops
inside the bottle for brittle glass feathers refracting the
spare light that could reach them. The last thought, before
the truth hit, was that this bird was done up in a
dapper vest of red and blue across his midsection,
this little dead gentleman, dressed for the day,
and it was this that made me want to lean in
to squint this strangeness into clarity, to be disappointed
to find that all that had moved me was a Pepsi bottle,
whose beauty I had never considered before,
though now, I guess, it would be consistent
to walk into the convenience store and a pause
to see the bottles lined up—chests puffed proud—
a line of strikingly handsome birds perched behind glass,
keeping the cold at bay by crowding close.
Ridiculous, seeing them, to think of the sincere sadness I felt
standing over the corpse of a bottle of Pepsi, though
I do maintain that, in the blurry morning light,
it did look a bit like something that had once known
how to fly, the sun glinting through its dew-drop feathers,
its head a blue cap above a perfectly fitted vest.
“The Bird with the Pepsi Plumage” first appeared in Neologism Poetry Journal
Goddfrey Hammit. 