That they are geniuses.
That they look ordinary,
as do their nests,
but even with nests
they audition each,
reject some
(their first studio
in the pear).
They tear
nothing down.
They add nests
as they add songs.
The mockingbird doesn’t
know what
is out of character.
It’s plain archival.
Post-midnight
is its critical hour,
its voice
scales way down.
It outlines
its songline,
offers bare
brilliance.
Not clean prose
but dry—
like a throat
in an audit.
Even in their quiescence
they go on being geniuses,
maybe— or especially —
as they say nothing.
“Try the whole
of a thought
in silence,
and to oneself.”
In their opera season,
they don’t have to say
a thing before they
sing something.
It seems to the mockingbird
that it has only lived,
and not at all that it is a genius
at living.
I wish I’d wake up in
the ear of one’s nest—
as a mute,
beginning all over again.
Every year, mockingbirds
with new dictionaries
are born
on my land.
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