One afternoon I saw a homing pigeon studying a painting, then preening. I suppose he entered the museum the same way birds enter malls or airports. His feathers shimmered like colors in the frames, everything awash in blues and greens. Most people believe that pigeons are not as smart as crows or blue jays. Like doves, they seem oblivious, flocking, food-focused, a nuisance.

There’s always more than meets the eye: A single vaned feather is composed of interlocking filaments, barbule, nanostructure, melanosomes. In 1918 a pigeon named Cher Ami carried a message for a U.S. Battalion trapped behind German lines before being shot right out of the sky, miraculously returning to headquarters though wounded.

Pigeons may not know the word “polymorphous,” but they can distinguish between classes of beings, between pigeon and person, between Monet and Picasso or Bach and Stravinsky. It’s true. My museum companion preferred Monet to Delacroix and Delacroix to Cezanne, was known to react to Picasso’s abstract images. Water Lilies-Morning, Still Life with Lobster, The Large Bathers, and Weeping Woman were his favorite paintings. I can only guess why. Water is compound. Stark figures. Tableaux. Uneven eyes and lines, greens, yellows, anguished mouth, inscrutable expressions. Everything more than it seems. This bird didn’t steal Picasso’s painting (though he may have tipped off the police with a note). He didn’t shy away from suffering or brokenness, saw himself in Monet’s colors, stepped right through the museum door the way I’d like to step through the frame, trace brush strokes into sky, feel buoyancy in water.

Compassion might float: iridescent, mirrored. A pigeon’s feathers gleam. Blue beckons.

Author’s Notes:

1. This poem was inspired in part by Watanabe, S., Sakamoto, J., & Wakita, M. (1995). “Pigeons’ discrimination of paintings by Monet and Picasso.” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 63, 165-174.
   
   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1334394/pdf/jeabehav00221-0041.pdf
   
   
2. Read more about wartime pigeons: Top 10 Heroic Wartime Pigeons by Jane Wu at ListVerse (5 July 2016).
   
   
3. Links to artworks: Water Lilies: Morning (1914, Claude Monet), Still-Life with Lobster (1826-27, Eugene Delacroix), The Large Bathers (1898-1905, Paul Cezanne), and Weeping Woman (1937, Pablo Picasso).
   
   
4. Picasso’s The Weeping Woman was stolen in 1986 from the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, but recovered undamaged in a railway station locker after police received an anonymous tip.
   
   

[All links above were retrieved on 8 August 2023.]

Elinor Ann Walker

(she/her) holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, lives near the mountains, and prefers to write outside. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Bracken, Cherry Tree, The Ekphrastic Review, FERAL, Gone Lawn, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Jet Fuel Review, Nimrod, Northwest Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Plume, and The Southern Review, among others.

Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and nominated for multiple awards in various genres, such as the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions. Two of her prose poems have been selected for a forthcoming anthology of contemporary prose poems (Madville Publishing). She has recently completed a full-length manuscript of poetry and is working on two chapbooks.

More details are available at her website: https://elinorannwalker.com