Mockingbird

Mockingbird, how well did the scientists name you!  Mimus polyglottos. You marvelous many-tongued mimic. You clever, feathered virtuoso. Who was it who informed you that you were here to sing more than one song? Who encouraged your reckless plagiarism, and gave you permission to ransack the repertoire of the bluejay and the blackbird, the cricket, the creaky gate, and the car alarm, then advised you to stitch them together in a crazy patchwork quilt of sound? You oddly arranged chorus of one. You auditory sampler, you relentless composer. You impudent thief, you conspicuous performer, you bewildering talent! How can I make you understand how you held us in thrall? Perched high on a telephone wire, singing for love and invisible gods. Animated by an intensity and vigor that seemed not entirely of this earth. No, divinely inspired. How you delighted in your own music! As if it were a thing aside from you. How you fluttered up into the air, and then down again, as if lifted by the sheer, unfettered genius of your song. How striking and unmistakable you were in flight! With those broad white stripes on the pleated fan of your dark gray wingtips. How you did not stop singing to fly. How a river of sound streamed uninterrupted from between your beak. As if you could not help yourself. As if songs swell and pour out of you of their own accord. Heedless of your better judgement. Careless of your will. What is the secret of your enthusiasm, that your songs burst forth so cheerily, even in the black velvet depths of night? What powers your nocturnal serenades (up to a thousand songs in the span of an hour!) when most of us, worn ragged by the cares of day, are fast asleep and dreaming? Is it your specialized diet of barberries, beetles, hawthorn, and grapes, grasshoppers, and rose hips, pokeweed, and sassafras, blackberries and true bugs? [And excuse me, but how do you know, really, whether a bug is true or fraudulent? Is it the shifty eyes that give them away, or the nervous clearing of a slender throat, a tendency to fidget?] But I digress. The real question before us is this: who is it, or what, within you, that improvises with such verve and daring? You perched pandemonium. You bird-shaped tower of babel. You hue and cry, you miniature hubbub, interspersed with arias and anthems, and chants and lays and lullabies. Were all the wheezy and the raspy notes of the world, all the molten trills, and high, clear whistles, the indignant squawks, the chitter and chatter, the murmurs and babbles, and operatic asides lying patiently in wait for one such as you, to come along and recognize their deep kinship to one another? Waiting for one with courage and class enough, to say, ‘This too belongs. This too is part of my song. This too I will sing, and surprise you. With my gravity and wit, my playful juxtapositions, my sly brilliance, my magnanimity and keen ear, my drollery, and lack of disdain.’ You discerning birdling. You singing sleekness. You wandering minstrel. We who are wingless and earthbound, we who are sometimes proud and often petulant and regrettably stuck in the one same song, look up at you and listen. And listening hear, just how much more we have to sing about. Had we but courage enough and class. To admit it all.