Winner of the Goodreads December 2009 Poetry Contest
The Parrot-Ox
The parrot-ox
is clearly confused,
as evidently
so were his parents.
Being both heavy and light,
he can neither
fly nor root,
which makes his life
a kind of hovering
between two things
that cross each other out.
All play is work,
all drudgery is sport,
and so he spends his days
busily doing nothing,
circling square
fields of thought
like a practical idealist.
At night he holds forth
in a neighborhood bar
in his undertakers suit
and Indian headdress.
He drinks to sober up
and tell again
the sad joke
of how we die at birth
into opposites.
And then he laughs
till he cries and cries
till he laughs,
sorrow and joy
mixing it up in his blood.
–Jane Ellen Glasser. All Rights Reserved.
Jane Ellen Glasser’s works have been published in the Hudson Review, the Georgia Review, and the Southern Review. Her second book, Light Persists, won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry in 2005.