Look! That's a Chicken! A Culebra Chicken!

When I spent a lot more time in town while at the cart, it wasn't at all unusual to hear people comment about the chickens running around wild. Sometimes, wildly. After many years in the Caribbean, it isn't so much that I don't notice them, but that they aren't the surprise they must be to visitors, especially visitors from dense city areas in the world, where pigeons are rampant, but not chickens. And yet, how often is pigeon on the menu? No point there, I'm just wondering. Any ideas?

My views are different now. Time in town is not infrequent but usually brief. I miss a lot of things I used to see, on a lot of levels. My views are still really good, I still see much.

I'm raising chickens, but the thing is, they all sort of look alike (please don't tell anyone that I don't really know them apart on any given day). I mean, they are bred to look that way, to give the eggs they do, that's who they are and I'm glad they are who they are. But I still don't know who they are.

Unrequited chicken love

The wild chickens, however, are under no such boundaries of constraint. Oh, some of them look to be from a similar strain but the differences are striking, sometimes for beauty, sometimes for sheer ugly, sometimes for peculiar. I like that.

Checking out her finery

Iguanas are related to cats on a certain level. I'm sure of it.

Somewhere out in the most wild growing part of my yard, there is a little bird, probably a chick, peeping away. I've tried to find it, last night by lantern, today by searching around, but it remains hidden. C'mon, Mama, find it so it will stop driving me crazier.

There is a wonderful poem, called Corson's Inlet by A. R. Ammons, that I think about a lot here on Culebra. This is one part that came to mind yesterday:

I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will   

not run to that easy victory:

            still around the looser, wider forces work:

            I will try

       to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening   

scope, but enjoying the freedom that

Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,   

that I have perceived nothing completely,

that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

Scope eludes my grasp. That's a good thing.

Have a widening Wednesday. Do something within reach, without strings.