Gabe Gudding

On the Rectum of Peacocks

very little has been written. Moored to the ploppy mud by a languid mind, the bird is strapped to its tube of paste by a frail girdle. Having not much brawn, and being rickety in its construction, it is a kind of wicker bird.  The rectum of a Peacock is thus like a flask in a picnic basket, as it might fall out if the bird is jostled.  In this sense the Peacock’s rectum is a fender on an antique car: it sits at the back and rattles.  If one kicks a Peacock, it is not unusual to knock the rectum clear out of the bird.

Peacocks have one rectum in common which they pass among them from Peacock to Peacock like a relay baton. Some people think that talent is like that. But it isn’t: talent is not like the butt-baton of Peacocks. Any community has a surplus of talent and is unlike the community of Peacocks, which has an insufficiency of rectums.

The anus is a kind of larynx of the nether region: it is the only vocal cord unattached to the lungs.  As such, it is an “independent” vocal cord ­ a kind of “colony” among vocal cords ­ a settlement of the voice in one of the body’s distant regions. The rectum, for instance, is the rec room of the body, where our feces romp as children before entering the world.  There is a certain amount of pomp at their graduation.

Each rectum is highly personal. Whereas a colostomy bag is a much more public device inasmuch as it hangs outside the body. A dog’s rear end is public, but a human one is not. Insofar as the anus will allow light into the rectum during a fart, the rectum is a kind of camera obscura. Diarrhea, before it is released from the body, is like an annoyed Raven in a leather jar. Once I tried to kill a Walleye after a large dinner, but I had grown so fat at table that I had to relearn how to punch, and I felt like Humpty Dumpty trying to learn kung fu. My rectum became essential to my weight loss. It is best not to gallop while wearing a colostomy bag.

In the center of even the best display, is a little jumble of mush essential to the survival of said display. Once when a boy, I saw my mother’s vulva reflected in a puddle. And do we all not come from puddles, waddling out with clapboard plumage ­and eyes to be seen?