Can white birds sing? An ornithologist
told me once there was a white bell-bird
that rang whole tones, though only as separate notes.
“Is that singing-sound without sequence?”
I said. “No, not exactly,” he granted,
“but it is white.” I granted him half a case.
This morning I heard a mocking bird again
and claimed my whole case back: no white bird sings.
I know some black poets who have been waiting
for just this image. So there it is, man:
an accident, but accidents are to use.
What else is a poem made of? Well, yes, ghosts.
But ghosts are only what accidents give birth to
once you have learned how to make accidents happen
purposefully enough to beget ghosts.
Bird song is itself an accident, a code
not much different from wolf-howl, warthog grunt,
porpoise twitter. It is a way of placing
the cardinal in its sconce, of calling its hen,
of warning off others. That code. We hear it
and re-code it: it sounds to us like something
we might like to try. Who cares how it sounds
to another bird? We take what we need from nature,
not what is there. We can only guess what is there.
Guess, then: why does no white bird sing
to our pleasure? Because, I will guess, songsters
nest in green-dapple. There what is white shines.
What shines is visible. What is most visible
is soonest hunted. What is soonest hunted
becomes extinct. To sing, one must hide in the world
one sings from, colored to its accidents
which are never entirely accidents. Not when one sings.
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