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The Unbuttered
Subculture of Cindy Birdsong Of course, there are
obvious, frankly, reasons that the missing Cindy Song (since 1980)
brings Cindy Birdsong to mind, another disappearance from my
life, though even when she was active —overly generous— in my
entertained days, she was replacement for a missing Supreme
after Diana and then Florence departed, and after
there was some flap really important to those flapping but
hardly worth resurrecting seeing as she can still
sing like an unspecified backup bird, so no surprise that
she’s just an afterthought here because of Cindy
Song who can’t be here though CB sometimes
took the lead in pop tunes nobody talks about much
unless necessary in trivial games where stakes can be
lucrative, millionaires made for knowing Cindy
Birdsong was a Supreme, as little as that, though at the
very least she was also a daughter and was probably at
least once somebody’s lover and perhaps the
recipient of fan mail and hate mail because she was a
Supreme, after being a Bluebelle at just about the time
that there were still Queens for a Day, though rarely African
Queens on that game show, all the royalty proud recipients of new
Frigidaires, Amanas, Bissells, & Hoovers. Cindy’s certainly not
the only afterthought; the linen bag of tomatillos in a
nearby poem is another, the shape appealing in the challenged
corner of my eye, contorted as if everything’s taken in the gut; in
one version it has a drawstring that can be pulled
noose-tight then gets turned upside
down into ideal bag over shrunken head about to
be hung though shrunken heads
don’t need redundant trip to the gallows especially since they
usually travel better, to non-publicized auctions as they make
their way into collections. The Jivaro of Ecuador made them
best, tsantas, skull-less heads rather like hairy dates
and dried plums, a kind of rum cake with lips stitched, a
kind of sturdy yarn cup. The majority of shrunken heads I’ve
seen have shar-pei faces or something that’s
found in the dark center when a
radiation-altered sunflower head opens, though this majority
needs to be qualified, as I’ve seen only a
half dozen shrunken heads outside of movies and most of those were
monkey heads (mostly in Toronto) though they weren’t
saying only monkey, resemblances & so forth, though
covering up and burial aren’t necessarily more respectable than
trophies unless the corpse prove
incorruptible and becomes patron saint of compact
embalming —not that, though it could be, the goodness of John
the Baptist is shrinkable. Mostly thinking must be
revised: like many, I once thought everything on television was in
television, shrunken to fit into the box in which case Cindy
Birdsong would have been the most remarkable of the
shrunken heads, singing up a storm the way she did the
last time I saw her & loved her in
color that could be changed, at volumes that could
be changed but she could not be
enlarged without getting out of
the box of static and cathode
rays, streaming electrons, without
giving up hordes of atomic and subatomic groupies. **
to complete her tenth book, Tokyo Butter, a volume of
poetry that will be published in 2005 by Persea.
She is the recipient of many literary awards and honors --all before her dedication to the limited fork. Slave Moth, a novel in verse, was published in 2004 and has been the basis of
an experimental short film and a dance production. She enjoys giving poetry concerts with her son who plays his original jazz-based
compositions while she sings variations of the printed poems. She teaches at the University of Michigan.
Archived
at http://lit.konundrum.com/poetry/mosst_poems.htm |
