Mockingbird
Now the mockingbird,
in an effort to be too much of itself,
mocks more than it can handle,
egret and gull,
heron and warbler and shrike,
its throat encumbered with sound,
until arriving at the char char char
of its own dark mind
it mocks itself,
swelling the gullet,
exploding the lungs,
scattering bone and feather
all the way to the south-bank
current in the river,
where the water, pipeline
to something more than itself,
carries them (each fleck
of white and of grey
at the end of a slanting sun
so conspicuous, in this other flight
so definitively absorbed)
out and down to where the bridge
rides high on the crest of its
shadow before going under.
Notes
While apparently expanding northward (as far as southern Nebraska), the mockingbird is still less familiar to denizens of the northern Great Plains than its close relatives, the Gray Catbird and Brown Thrasher. (And so it is one of the best reasons to visit the southern Great Plains, by the way.) The current Nebraska Poet Laureate expresses a good familiarity with it, nonetheless, in a poem that presents the bird's extroverted, egoistical mimic nature well. The notion that, after imitating so many other species' calls, it also vocalizes its "own dark mind" is a fascinating angle, and this self-mocking authentic call is then metaphorically transformed through the rest of the poem: it becomes the bird's very body (and sheer egoism) exploding, the gray and white feathers suffusing the environment, across and down the river, to the horizon and setting sun.
