Poem (Mockingbird)
Mockingbird The friend hugs you a little longer than usual and winks. "Andrew was not the Brother of the Lord," he says, and you wonder just who is the lord in this story. Who is to say that life now and then is not just a little ragingly peculiar? One pleases oneself mainly or all the time. And does not consider either social work, the police, or a monastery, though perhaps the one where they soap the steps every year on the Friday before Easter, or the one where everyone is gay. Deliberate pleasure isn't soft and dreamy, but uneasy like the sound of the distant sea, sufficient, proper, and unassailable. There are no new ways to go much of anywhere. And yet you're still trying to tell us how sweet it is, how the isolated engine listens to the mockingbirds as if they were sweet doves, their tails fanned out in terror mimicking our curiosity of them. You know you can't ...