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.

**

Writing regularly with a limited fork these days, Thylias Moss has managed

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.php