If all the chickens you had ever eaten returned to haunt you at the dining table, would you believe your eyes or fear for your head?
Spiritual Chickens
by Stephen Dobyns
(Velocities: New and Selected Poems, Bloodaxe)
A man eats a chicken every day for lunch,
and each day the ghost of another chicken
joins the crowd in the dining room. If he could
only see them! Hundreds and hundreds of spiritual
chickens, sitting on chairs, tables, covering
the floor, jammed shoulder to shoulder. At last
there is no more space and one of the chickens
is popped back across the spiritual plain to the earthly.
The man is in the process of picking his teeth.
Suddenly there’s a chicken at the end of the table, . . .
The man makes a grab for the chicken but his hand
passes right through her. He tries to hit the chicken
with a chair and the chair passes through her . . .
Faced with the choice between something odd
in the world or something broken in his head,
he opts for the broken head. Certainly,
this is safer than putting his opinions
in jeopardy. Much better to think he had
imagined it, that he had made it happen.
Meanwhile, the chicken struts back and forth . . .
Even the nervous man has disappeared. If she
had a brain, she would think she had caused it.
She would grow vain, egotistical, she would
look for someone to fight, but being a chicken
she can just enjoy it and make little squawks,
silent to all except the man who ate her,
who is far off banging his head against a wall
like someone trying to repair a leaky vessel,
making certain that nothing unpleasant gets in
or nothing of value falls out. How happy
he would have been to be born a chicken,
to be of good use to his fellow creatures
and rich in companionship after death.
As it is he is constantly being squeezed
between the world and his idea of the world.
Better to have a broken head — why surrender
his corner on truth? — better just to go crazy.
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I love poems that tell stories, especially stories born of an extension of the thought “what if?” This poem is written by a man who might have sat down to his dinner one night, and found himself gazing across the kitchen at the little chicken carcass sitting forlornly in a roasting tray. What if, he might have thought, the chicken had a spirit just as some of us think we do? And surely, if we think we do, then a chicken must? And for every human spirit there must be hundreds of chicken spirits. In the spirit world we might drown in chickens. What if . . .
This is not a poem for vegetarians. Mind you, if you abhor the idea of eating anything that once drew breath, you might feel that the chicken-eater of the poem receives his just desserts.
Spiritual chickens are not the centre of the story, only the means by which the chicken-eater is forced to call into question his idea of what to believe and what not to believe. Our eyes, as we know, can deceive us, or there would be no magicians and illusionists. Our minds try to correct what we see that is odd or out of place, when perhaps we should take notice and wonder at the reason for it. And this is where madness lies; after all, who determines what is real and what is not? You? Me? A general consensus of people we’ve never met?
One of my best friends once admitted that as a child she had seen figures of people that no one else could see, who walked among those who were solidly present. She didn’t know if the interlopers were spirits or a projection of her own mind. But in case it was a symptom of madness, she kept quiet and appears very sane to this day. She was surprised when I didn’t think her confession made her appear mad, but how would I know if the ghostly figures weren’t real? They might have been. An agnostic, perhaps, would entirely disagree and, in doing so, might sentence my friend to an institution just as the chicken-eater in the poem is sentenced.
We eat many millions of chickens and, if they all have little spirits, we really have to consider the possibility of reincarnation, if only from the point of view of recycling.
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The chicken spirit in the poem, of course, has none of these worries. I should mention that in my wish to include a poem that is longer than would fit the format, I have had to cut a dozen lines or so in which the man calls his wife to look at the chicken, but she can see nothing because the chicken spirit is “his own private chicken, even if he/ fails to recognise her”. And since plucked chickens look much the same “How is he to know/ this is a chicken he ate seven years ago/ on a hot and steamy Wednesday in July, with a little tarragon, a little sour cream?” (I have the recipe and it’s mouth-watering.) “The man grows afraid. He runs out of his house/ flapping his arms and making peculiar hops/ until the authorities take him away for a cure.” He is afraid of the truth; he disbelieves his own eyes and his wife’s inability to see the happy chicken spirit only confirms his doubt in himself. There are times in our lives when we should stick to our convictions, but sometimes we have no way of knowing when those convictions are correct. If we rely on others for confirmation we give them power over us, so we need to choose the right people.
The 11-year-old autistic son of another friend of mine once asked his father: “Daddy, you know we dream?” (to which his father nodded). “Well, which world should I spend more time in, this world or the other world?” Which world, in other words, is the real one? Good question. The world we occupy is of our own making; it is only as solid as our own convictions, and the chicken-eater in the poem is faced with choices that will fundamentally affect the world he has constructed for himself: admit to madness so that he can consider the chicken a figment of his imagination, or embrace the chicken as a real spirit and admit to the possibility that nothing in his universe is as it seems.
The latter choice could leave him doubting the ground he walked on. So there he is, choosing madness, “banging his head against a wall/ like someone trying to repair a leaky vessel”, (while in contrast, the chicken is dumb, witless and dead, but extremely happy in its ignorance of this); the man does not wish to grasp the truth that undoes the safety of the world as he knows it. He is not ready for spiritual chickens.
frieda.hughes@thetimes.co.uk