Nick Lantz is a copyeditor in Madison, Wisconsin. His first two collections of poetry—We Don’t Know We Don’t Know (Graywolf Press) and The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House (University of Wisconsin Press)—will appear in 2010. “Of the Parrat and other birds that can speake” is part of a series of poems that take their titles and epigraphs from Philemon Holland’s 17th-century translation of Pliny’s Natural History. "Of the Parrat and other birds that can speake" Nick Lantz            It is for certain knowne that they have died            for very anger and griefe that they could not            learn to pronounce some hard words.                                             —Pliny the Elder When you buy the bird for your mother you hope it will talk to her. But weeks pass before it does anything except pluck the bars with its beak. Then one day it says, “infect.” Your mother tells you this on the phone, and you drive over, find the frozen meals you bought for her last week sweating on the countertop. “In fact,” she says in answer to your question, “I have been eating,” and it’s as you point to the empty trash can, the spotless dishes, that you realize the bird is only saying, “in fact,” that this is now the preamble to all of your mother’s lies. “In fact,” she says, “I have been paying the bills,” and you believe her until you find a cache of unopened envelopes in the freezer. More things are showing up where they shouldn’t. Looking out the back window one evening you see craters in her yard. While she’s watching TV, you go out with a trowel and excavate picture frames, flatware that looks like the silver bones of some exquisite animal. You worry when you arrive one day and see the open, empty cage that you will find the bird dead, stuffed in an oven mitt and left in a drawer, but you find it sitting on her shoulder in the kitchen. “In fact,” she says, “he learned to open the cage himself.” The bird learns new words. You learn which lies you can ignore. The stroke that kills her gives no warning, not— the doctor assures you—that anyone can predict such things. When you drive home that night with the cage belted into the passenger seat, the bird makes a sound that is not a word but that you immediately recognize as the sound of your mother’s phone ringing, and you know it is the sound of you calling her again and again, the sound of her not answering.