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
   talk to the birds in
the trees. Nor the fields
of orange poppies which close out Sunday morning on
   television, their soft
petals untouchable like the instep. Or the patch of fine hair
   at the base of the
spine. Private and disconsolate, draining. Then
the friend who never considered you before goes home
saying something about how he wants to call you about
   something. Or another
day on which someone else decides to join a dead lover.