Ode on a Mockingbird
Lithe shadow, organic jukebox, sly note-taker,
twirling your vocal cords about
like the rainbowy ribbons of a Maypole,
what do you love? do you love? do you love?
I’ve let the birdfeeder level drop down,
but you stay on, enraptured, giddy.
Look: I’m not the type to call a poem song
or waste ink on what a bird might “think.”
But this one! When he pauses, tips his
fragile, drab tail at the sky, pauses,
then lets fly his fly his fly his—hey!
He has reasons. He’s selective,
doesn’t juxtapose the same way
each time around. He seems to swivel
with the wind from song to song
(though the weathercock’s is one
he can’t be bothered with); each
a dead ringer for the source.
You can almost hear other birds tisking:
That show-off, faker, no-count,
cheap bastard of a bird, just who
does he whooduzee whooduzee think he is?
It’s mating season, of course.
He’ll be quiet, deathly so,
once summer settles in and the point,
the whole poi-poi-point eludes him.
But for now, like some manic Eliot
on uppers he keeps on, he do
the Police sometimes all night, occasionally
with a bit of nesting material wedged
jauntily in the crook of his beak
like a young tough waggling his Marlboro,
look Ma no mouth,
he warbles, tweets, buzzes, trickles, trills.
He does it so well that every single spring
I’m fooled, I think this one
is different, he’ll keep it up all year,
this one does it for sheer love of singing,
loves the zillion singwingednesses of the world
and wants it all to issue from his breast alone,
lightly like a spring bubbling up from the dust,
loves my alarm clock and the rufous-sided towhee
with equal ferocity, this one the true,
true lover, this one the Emil-Emil-Emily
ribbons around neat packets of song,
doesn’t care if we’re listening, me or the ex,
or a current or future mate, or master,
the last mockingbird on the block, doesn’t give
a twat-twit-twat-what? crow’s turd
what comes of his exertions, ruffles then
riffs off again, this time jay-gull-cardinal-dove
red-winged-blackbird-phoebe-mallard-duck!
It’s month two: by now he’s knocked
up his share,
come on, by now he’s attracted every mockingchick
for acres, miles. What keeps him singing, and
what
will stop him? One day in June, one day soon in June.
What caused Emily to tie her final ribbon
in the somehow stiller stillness of her room?
What silences that kind of lover?
What do they know that I don’t yet?
How do you how do you
end the song
that might be your last?
First appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review.