Vale, Corinna

They come in at seven, or at what the body has decided to call seven. A green that does not belong to this palette. The greens of this land are dusty ones: olive, caper, the grey-green of almond leaves that have survived another June. This green is lacquered, tropical, wrong. It crosses the sky like a thrown handful of unripe fruit, and it screams.

I heard them before I saw them, in a courtyard off the road that goes up toward Modugno, where a man stood under his almond trees with his arms hanging at his sides. He was not chasing them. He was past chasing. Monk parakeets, says the gazette. Myiopsitta monachus: the monk, hooded in grey like a friar who took orders in another hemisphere and forgot them during the crossing. They came from the Rio de la Plata decades ago, in cages, as merchandise, as company for widows; and then they came out of the cages, as everything eventually comes out of everything. A cage is only a promise made by wire, and wire is patient about breaking it. First Molfetta. Then the coast, then inland: Bisceglie, Giovinazzo, Bitonto, Bitetto, the names climbing like the birds themselves toward the high stone of the Murgia. Yesterday the papers said the colonies had reached the pinewood at Barletta. The farmers' union uses the word razzia. Raid. A Saracen word, an old one; this coast remembers raids the way a jaw remembers pulled teeth, by the gap.

What they do is precise. They split the woody shell and take the seed out with the tongue. The tongue is thick and black, like a thumb wearing a glove. What remains on the branch looks whole until you touch it, and then it weighs nothing. A third of all the almonds of Italy grow in this region, nineteen thousand hectares and change, and I walked through one narrow strip of them this morning and the trees rattled. Empty shells make a sound that full shells do not make. The body noticed this before the mind did, and the body did not like it. It is a sound with a hole in it, the sound of a pocket turned out.

In the language of the prophets the almond is שקד (shaqed) and the watcher is שקד (shoqed), the same letters, a vowel apart. When the boy Jeremiah was asked what he saw, he said: a branch of almond. And the voice answered that he had seen well, for I am watching over my word. The pun works only because the almond wakes first. It flowers in January, ahead of everything, white while the frost is still finishing its rounds; the sleepless tree, the sentinel tree. And now something watches the watcher. From the pines, all day, with a lidless yellow eye.

The region has answered the way regions answer. A plan, a decree, a task force of licensed operators. Nests removed where the damage is judged grave. Eggs destroyed immediately, the document says, immediately, as though speed were a kind of mercy. Nestlings suppressed, euthanasically, by qualified personnel, according to the indications of the institute. The university will monitor. I read the language of the plan standing up, in full sun, and the words kept sliding into other words, the way a street you have known for years can one afternoon reveal that it has too many corners.

Ovid buried one parrot and it took him thirty-eight couplets. Psittacus, Eois imitatrix ales ab oris, occidit: the parrot, that imitator bird from the shores of Dawn, is dead. Corinna's toy, her plaything with the emerald back. It ate almost nothing, he insists, a nut, a poppy seed, a sip of plain water; it died with its master's name in its beak, Corinna, vale. One bird, one elegy, a mound of earth the size of a fist, and a small stone claiming the tail had been green. The decree does not say vale. The decree says soppressione. I am not weighing the elegy against the decree; the scale the body carries is not calibrated for weights of that kind. I only record that both are documents concerning green birds and death, and that only one of them rhymes.

There was a wall once, in this same city I believe, with serpents living behind it, and nobody looked, and the not-looking was the point. Or I dreamed the wall. What stays is the temperature of the stone against a palm, cool in the wrong season. The rest of it has gone soft at the edges, and I find I am willing to let it go.

At dusk they gather into their nests, and this is the strangest of all their strangenesses: alone among the parrots of the earth they build, communal stick fortresses big as confessionals, chambered, added to year after year, heavy enough in the end to bring down the branch that agreed to hold them. Monks indeed. A colony is a monastery is a siege engine, and the vow they keep is appetite. Stand under one near the pines at evening and you can hear them settling, a sound like an argument about rooms, in a language that was somebody's pet once.

The man under his trees finally moved. He bent, picked one shell off the ground, shook it beside his ear the way you shake a box that arrived too light, and put it in his pocket. Not for planting. Some receipts we keep although nothing can be returned.

Claudius, il Guscio