“Warwick Castle Peacocks”

“Here, on the island, the peacocks roamed in all their weird glory. The creatures appeared to contain three entirely dissimilar bodies in one: an electric-blue neck, so stunningly bright as to be almost overpowering, a brown-gray-and-white back that looked like brain tissue or fish scales, and a tail that might have been a nest woven by a poet for a nymph—a tail that, when spread, was twenty times the size of the bird spreading it, with spined quills like blanched bones, with a hundred floating blossoms of eyes, cornflower blue and pale turquoise, slightly out of focus, like something the creator designed on a spring morning, when twenty, in love, and enjoying a sip of fine Bordeaux. To see this bird in its out-flung glory, plumage arranged against a background of purplish-pink rhododendrons and pinky-white rose blooms, bounded by verdant shrubbery, was to experience a visual exoticism rare in life.”