Don't name the chickens, says poet Charles Simic, because doing so is to find yourself leaning into a perceptual left hook. . As the poem details, in details inspired by the spare , weathered cadences of WC Williams, chickens in the barnyard are not really the kings of their domain as folk tales and cartoons would suggest, but merely a creature inhabiting a niche on which some things depend on; lording or majesty have nothing to do with it. We have the terrain Simic sets up beautifully, a small niche in the natural order that is overlaid with expectations that suit the man or woman gazing from a window, from the porch, on their way to the barn to repair a machine.
Don't Name the Chickens
Let them peck in the yard
As they please
Or walk over to stand
By the edge of the road.
The rooster strutting about
Will keep an eye on them,
Till it's time for them
To step under a tree
And wait for the heat
To pass and the children
To return to their toys
Left lying in the dust.
For, come Sunday,
One of the chickens may lose its head
And hang by its feet
From a peg in the barn.
This is beautifully done, I believe, a cold and crackling laugh coming from the throat, and winding up echoing through the nose, a combination of bemusement and revulsion with the vanities citizens dress themselves in, the idea that persists even on the most micro level, that the events of the day revolve around them.
Naming creatures implies ownership, that the animal given a Christian assignation is now part of the family, like the dog or the cat, embedded in the good graces of human social structure until death , a natural death. But again, the power to name things and bestow upon them the complexities of far reaching relationships with kindred human significants are projections of our collective ego, personalized, brought down from the global to the specific, the back yard, the barnyard.
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