Finding the One Brief Note

I woke this morning from the uneasy
sleep of a stranger in strange bedsheets
to bogus cardinal, robin trill
off-key, boisterous fake
crow caws, and at intervals
sounds that suggested the air brakes
of huge semis flinging themselves downhill.

In Greensboro, mockingbird capital
of the South, en route to teach a class
in prosody, I meet Delia
encumbered with stopwatch,
graph paper and tape recorder,
capturing the mid-fall melodies
of flocks of year-round mockers.

On a campus hedged with chinaberry trees,
while I am saying poems, she collects
arpeggios, engine music
and vaguely flatted masterpieces.
Delia knows that something good will come
from storing up these plainly suited clones’
repertoires each weekday

and I too haltingly assay
our single-minded still imperfect song.
We eulogize autumn, we long
for a better world, we seek to deliver
a purer the one brief note that says we mean,
roughshod and winged, to last forever.
hemidemisemiquaver,