A Bird Walks Into A Bar

Lauren McGinn is a Philosophy major from the Class of 2025. 

This poem is a dialogue, over drinks,  between the narrator: a phenomenologist, and a rook: a dark crow-like bird that is regarded as the bringer of chaos. The narrator asks 3 questions, to which the rook parrots back the same truthful response. The poem is about the mysteries of the self, temporality, and love.

Profiles, moments, and aspects, the cube is never the same any time I look

“Why does life happen this way?” I call out into the air as if to ask

“Due to the uncertainty of time” calls out the brooding rook


I hold you in abstraction, a version of you, a meager compilation of moments bound neatly in my minds book

with threads of growing understanding of who you are, I embark on an impossible task

Profiles, moments, and aspects, the cube is never the same any time I look


I bring our moments up in the alcove of intention, I study the fractured truths held in only my noetic nook,

I surface with a question: “Why is there a wonder if that’s him or a mere a love-stained memorative mask?”

“Due to the uncertainty of time” calls out the brooding rook


I suppose I need to remember Dasein, before I realize I have mistook

the state of reality, In my solitude I dance among the world we have in common. I briefly stop time to bask

Profiles, moments, and aspects, the cube is never the same any time I look


“Is loving not as close as we can get to knowing?” To love is to forget your world; I find a swim in a Lethian brook

with hopes of seeing how the world appears to you, to watch your effervescent masque

“Due to the uncertainty of time” calls out the brooding rook


I can never see all of you and yet I happily speculate about what evades me from the moments that we took,

I reach the bottom of my glass and begin to nurse my flask

Profiles, moments, and aspects, the cube is never the same any time I look

“Due to the uncertainty of time” calls out the brooding rook

Winter 2023