Or "The Pigeon and the Person"
To the first pigeon to pass the mirror test with flyer's colors
Nature may not favor
the hungrier more monogamous
more attentive
louder flock,
unrepentant, stalking the planet
with its subspecialized savagery
its munitioners, deforesters, prolongers
taxidermists, exterminators,
anthropomorphists, unapologists.
Both dance well enough
on taxonomic branch but only one
leaves its feet after the pirouette
flimsy nests merging easily
back into civil congress
of yolk and yarn
teaching their young
that nostalgia of flying lessons
is mere training-ground myopia.
But defenseless against trickery
of larger flock's bloodletting
& given to collaborator-flights
came instrument of Axis or Allied ruin
whose engineers overlooked
this alternate Enigma Machine
whose biomechanics
made the better design tradeoff
between walking and flying.
Their image-memory may hold Leonardo's geometries,
or peck at vanishing points on a Starry Night.
It is intelligence sluiced in paint or blood
on two-sided canvas
species facing away from each other
as if there were too few secrets left
of the mirror
of the test itself
of the self in the fading light
of the dreamer's disquiet:
whir of wings seeking only seeds
from Pericles' empty Parthenon.
Watanabe, S.: "Van Gogh, Chagall and Pigeons: Picture Discrimination in Pigeons and Humans", Animal Cognition, vol. 4, nos. 3-4 (2001), pp. 147–151.
October 2011