In memory of my grandfather

I wrung the neck of a robin with a broken wing today. It was lying on the sidewalk with glassy alien eyes. It was a fantasy I’d had for a while, putting a wounded bird out of its misery, but as a way of impressing a girl: she’d be horrified at the suggestion at first, but I’d convince her it was the only thing to do. If I’d been with a girl I probably would have done it right away, but being alone I was less motivated. I passed the bird on my way to the supermarket and again on my way back. It had started raining and people were walking by giving it fleeting glances. When I got back home I’d thought about it too much: without taking off my coat, I got my umbrella (I discovered it had a broken stem and had some trouble opening it) and went back out. As I approached the bird and made to close the umbrella, it stuck out in the wrong places and I had to cram it shut. This sounds like a contrived poem, but that’s what happened. If I were a poet, this is the sort of thing I might have rushed home to write a poem about: maybe not about how a squirt of white excrement came out of the bird while I did it, maybe not how I had to do it twice, and especially not how, while I was carrying it home to put it in my bin I thought I felt it move in my hand, threw it to the ground and stepped on its neck hoping no one was watching; but about how the things I touched afterwards reminded me with a shudder of its damp bony body and open beak, about how my grandfather the farmer used to do the same thing as a matter of unsentimental necessity when he slaughtered chickens and when the cats in the hayloft produced superfluous kittens, and how I’m a futile child of the postmodern age who’s lost touch with the noble and natural art of neck-wringing.