Some traits are too deep to excavate
or remold,
like the impulse to take wing, to jump
into the sky
at the first sign of danger; to do so
now would be
tantamount to suicide, he is not only
that much heavier
after his surgery, his wings have been
reduced to mere
appendage, his feathers shorn to stubble
that must by Law
be trimmed daily (although for the first time
since hatching
he is lice-free). But even if he wanted to,
atavistically, no matter
how clever the knifework or indoctrinaire
the post-op, he
also can never deny what he was. The only
way, for example,
he can remember his vocabulary (another
of the lessons
in Sapience he and all the other erigates
must undergo)
is to charge each word with tonal nuance,
cooing up and down
in liquid syllables. Worst still, even if he could
somehow break
free of his new constraints and leave the island
far behind him
like the shadow map of his House-bound pain,
he would wake
every day, see the sun in a foreign corner
of the sky,
and know that as much as he wanted to
to return,
he had been recast, unplumaged, like
an angel in Gehenna,
able to remember only the wrong prayers.