I was listening to Greg Brown last night, his live album named, appropriately, "The Live One" from some time ago, which was the first album of his that I ever owned. On it, he talks about Pablo Neruda and his poem "Cierto Cansancio" which I believe translates to "A Certain Weariness."
The line in the poem goes,
I am weary of chickens:
no one knows what they're thinking,
and they look at us with dry eyes
and consider us unimportant.
Brown's comment on this is, "which is true. They do, you know? We are... but it's hard to take it from a damn chicken, you know?"
Now, I'm not weary of any of this. Far from it. But I have little idea what she's thinking, and when she looks at me with these eyes, I do feel unimportant. At least, relatively speaking, that is.
(btw - Greg Brown plays in our neck of the woods on April 3rd, at the Narrows Center for the Arts.)