I’ll never get used to peacocks roaming around as if they were chicken or stray cats. I just can’t believe such fabulous creatures (second only to what? phoenix, unicorn, bird of paradise?) would casually parade among banal folks… people.
Peacocks are not people. They don’t form a crowd. When they group, cross or intertwine (as if strolling up and down the main boulevard on a summer evening) they always keep a slight distance. They brush by almost feigning indifference, deeply absorbed in personal cares. If they imperceptibly nod, acknowledging one another, we can’t tell. There’s something mysterious in their attitude. Enigmatic.
Still they aren’t snob in the least. There’s an aura of naivety about them, yet more scandalous associated with such an appearance. They have the slowness of dinosaurs and the same stupor, as if just awoken from hibernation, from some sort of amnesia. And in fact they wander, surprised, in a world that quite evidently is not their own, that they don’t recognize.
These particular peacocks flew out of a botanical garden then they multiplied in the neighborhood. They didn’t go far, becoming a local feature. Their call fills the night in all seasons: they start screaming at sunset with a sound quite hard to define. Disgraceful, acrid, plaintiff but with a note of questioning: as if uttering a stupid hope over and over though we all know it’s a lost cause. A wildcat’s scream: nothing airy or birdlike about it. Something feral instead. Childish maybe. Something dumb, still close to the soul… mine at least.
They start screaming at sunset while they wander on sidewalks, cross streets, pecker flower beds, rest on lawns, fly on walls, perch on roofs where they land with a heavy thud (as if they were not birds but flying carpets, spaceships or meteorites). On the roof they keep howling, looking eagerly into remote horizons, searching for something that we can’t imagine… a dot in the distance… a balloon becoming smaller and smaller… a very pale star. There is something haunting about them: eerie sentinels scanning skies that for us remain mute, neutral, undecipherable.
As I said they don’t make a crowd: that’s why to see many is quite thrilling. Each of them is unique even when it looks like another. Not a matter of color and shape. Neither of expression: they have none. It’s their poise that doesn’t admit repetition. It just happens once. Then again, it happens once.
Female peacocks are pretty as a background, a teaser, raising our appetite for the male. The male is a miracle. He displaces here and there its disproportioned beauty with sublime resignation. There’s no hint of arrogance, there’s no pride: it looks innocent as a rose blooming, a tree spreading its shade, a lofty mountain or river. Still we detect a halo of gravity, of unconscious embarrassment: as for bearing the weight of long-lived nobility or a ponderous coat of arms.
Why is the male so outrageously gorgeous? That’s a useless feature. Who could state if it looked like a turkey (no aqua tones, no swan’s neck, precious crest, stellar, kilometric, arabesque, laced, filigreed, fantabular tail) it wouldn’t be able to mate? Wouldn’t females notice? Would the species be extinguished? Come on. On the contrary: it’s a total prodigy such monster of aesthetic delirium survived. As I said it’s a dinosaur. That is why it hops on rooftops and howls at the moon, at the setting sun… at planets long disappeared it still can see but we don’t. Its reign visibly is not of this world.
Is it by mere chance that these peacocks (former runaways, now prosperous settlers) dwell in residential suburbs where they perfectly match the landscape? They enhance emerald lawns, lavishly tended gardens, mansions laid on the grounds with similarly discrete nonchalance.
No chicken would be allowed around here but peacocks can stride. Is it accidental? I don’t know. I will never get used to peacocks. I’ll keep wondering just as they do.
Toti O’Brien’s work has appeared in The Altadena Review, Poetic Diversity, Edgard Allan Poet, Litro NY and other journals. She has published two children books, two short story collections and an essay collection in Italian. She has collaborated with Italian magazines such as Mezzocielo, Salpare, L’Ostile and Inguine.
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