Author's Note:
The whole story of this poem is true. Before my Camry, I had a Chevrolet regularly serviced at the dealership where the events took place. Over a period of time I’d heard about and even heard the bantam rooster. Before I had a chance to see him, though, he had disappeared, was gone except for an image of him in the computer of one of the dealership’s car bays. Nothing the men had said prepared me for how beautiful their onetime mascot was. The man at “my” check-in bay, the man who had first begun feeding the creature, hypothesized that someone thought he was a prize fowl and abducted him.
Nobody even knew where he had come from – he just showed up like a noisy sunrise in a little patch of woods, a bit of unspoiled nature, at the edge of the Chevrolet lot – and then he was gone. No matter that they’d fed him, tried to make him one of them, even procured him a wife. He was gone.
I suspect that I’m the only one who ever fancied him a sort of unrecognized “divine emissary.” Incarnation and the other details of New Testament “wedding” eschatology are my own secular but I hope not irreverent addition to the story. I appropriated the religious language and ideas to make the point about a re-entry of the sacred, of the eternal, into the everyday world of matter and time.
I am not religious myself, but do subscribe to the idea of the all-importance of nature – of its sacredness, even. In a world paved over, fenced off, poisoned with exhaust, I am trying to say something about our sometimes too proprietary human attitudes and behaviors in an already compromised world.
