Chicks Flushing, But I Can't Eat a Grouse

Poetry Daily has posted an awesomely bad poem today about flushing birds. I can only imagine that "Furniture of the World" was published in the Boston Review because the author resides in Cambridge. Perhaps she met somebody? It's funny how PD reports that a poem is selected "for its literary quality"? I thought PD was trying to attract new readers of poetry, not send them scurrying away? (Stop trying already! All of you!)

It's not clear whether the birds are being flushed or if they're actually doing the flushing themselves. Maybe it's a metaphor, you know, like there's a bunch of chicks in the lady's room that I'm spying on. That, at least, might explain why I fall to my knees. And I have to assume she's talking to me, since the "you" of the poem isn't defined at all, not even hinted at (I'll take hinted at!) as being herself or some lover or other friend or relative or enemy. Maybe the birds are simply turning red, and the poet just didn't care that many readers will laugh at the first line as they initially read the opening words to the sound of a toilet. The poet won't deign to say why the bird would be turning red; but it's too bad she couldn't at least specify what bird it was, that could clear things up. Bird specificity shows up in the next line, though, with "a hazel grouse" I couldn't eat for some reason. (I don't normally eat a whole fowl anyway, just a breast usually.) Do American restaurants serve hazel grouse? Why not a bigger grouse? Why not a kind of turkey or chicken or duck? I'd love to cook somebody's goose. But at lest she tells me why I couldn't eat a grouse for what I make of the chicks flushing the lady's room; it's because of "the soft berth of [my] own / great reliable outcome." Apparently I have a soft "spot" reserved for the ship of the things that I almost always do. Or maybe the berth is a bed to bunk in once my day is done? Who knows? In the real world something is configured in order to meet certain requirements. In this poem I configure myself "out of the quiet blood of beasts" (although quiet blood would seem to be blood of the dead, but even still: my dad was not quiet, and: are you calling my mom a beast?) so that I may be a toy. Why would I make myself into a toy? Aren't there better ways to become mild as a giraffe? Is this there to reassure me that I'm only a peeping tom with my "discrete, unrequired interest" in the flushing chicks. That being "mild" I'm really harmless, not a stalker, or a rapist. Well, jeez, that's nice to know. Did I really have to configure myself to do that? Are you sure I didn't have any help? Ah well, just cut out a phrase from a catalog and stick it over the words. There, we have a poem. Let's just hope somebody doesn't "tie [it] to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it."