<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class=""><b class="">Spiritual Chickens</b></div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; min-height: 22px;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">A man eats a chicken every day for lunch, and each day the ghost of another chicken joins the crowd in the dining room. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">If he could only see them! </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">Hundreds and hundreds of spiritual chickens, sitting on chairs, tables, covering the floor, jammed shoulder to shoulder. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">At last there is no more space and one of the chickens is popped back across the spiritual plain to the earthly. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">The man is in the process of picking his teeth. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">Suddenly there is a chicken at the end of the table, strutting back and forth, not looking at the man but knowing he is there, as is the way with chickens. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">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. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">He calls in his wife but she can see nothing. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">This is his own private chicken, even if he fails to recognize her. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">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? </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">The man grows afraid. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">He runs out of his house flapping his arms and making peculiar hops until the authorities take him away for a cure. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">Faced with the choice between something odd in the world or something broken in his head, he opts for the broken head. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">Certainly, this is safer than putting his opinions in jeopardy. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">Much better to think he had imagined it, that he had made it happen. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">Meanwhile, the chicken struts back and forth at the end of the table. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">Here she was, jammed in with the ghosts of six thousand dead hens, when suddenly she has the whole place to herself. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">Even the nervous man has disappeared. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">If she had a brain, she would think she had caused it. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">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. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">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. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">As it is he is constantly being squeezed between the world and his idea of the world. </div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">Better to have a broken head - why surrender his corner on the truth? - better just to go crazy.</div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; min-height: 22px;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>- Stephen Dobyns</div><div class=""><br class=""></div></body></html>