My friend tells me his uncle the sailor died and left him a parrot that nobody else would take because the bird was so profane, and not long after, my friend threw a party at his house, and the parrot was in a cage in the kitchen, and I must have walked by him a dozen times to get a beer, fetch ice, use the rest room, and the parrot was silent the whole time, and finally almost everyone had gone home, so I went back in to get a broom and help clean up, and I stopped in the kitchen and looked at the parrot for a good long minute, and finally he took a couple of those little childlike steps parrots take when they’re sidling down that bar they all perch on, and when he got close to the bars of the cage, he tilted his head and leaned toward me and said, “Fuck a duck.” I wonder what he meant by that. Okay, he was a bird, and a duck is another, but why would a duck appear attractive to a parrot? Another way to look at it is, why would a parrot think a duck would appeal to me? That’s beyond my understanding of interspecies romance. Experts say parrots don’t really talk the way we do, that they simply mimic their owners so they’ll be accepted. But if that’s so, why wasn’t this parrot more chatty? No, I think he was just in love with the beauty of the language: the clipped Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, the plosive k-sounds of both the f- and the d-word, the rhyme. Good bird.