To Love a Mockingbird

Hallelujah!  I'm decompressing after spending the whole fall working on a manuscript of poems.  I sent one version off at the end of September-- haven't heard-- and then I had an epiphany which prompted me to completely redo the book.  I wrapped all up yesterday around noon and had that glorious "Look What I Did" feeling when I hit "send" to a major poetry publication prize.

I've written many poems that draw on imagery from opera and other classical music, as well as having it in my mind and alluded to in several poems that my poetic soul identifies with the mocking bird-- that it is plain, yet with a spectacular imitative repertoire-- thirty musical patterns, in sequence,  from other birds in addition to its own song-- that it sings at night, especially when the moon is full (I have insomnia), and that it co-parents with its mate, generally mating for life-- I like these things about it-- and I no doubt would have mated for life and co-parented had I had the option..
. .
I had been in a quandary over the title of the mss and struggling to achieve some unity among the sections when several things happened at once to point me in a new direction;  one was the death of the great diva Joan Sutherland, an idol and indirect mentor of mine in terms of the fact that I am a closet coloratura soprano.

The other was that I discovered that Walt Whitman and I are kindred spirits; he loved bel canto operatic singing which was in an ascendancy and very popular on the East Coast when he was writing, he strove to duplicate singing and the lyric in his work, and, lo and behold,  he was inspired early on by the mourning of a bereft mocking bird..

If I had ever realized this, I had forgotten it; it had been years since I had read "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" which has a mocking bird holding forth in it, with numerous references to song and singing,  and not until I searched for titles incorporating "mocking bird" did I run across a reference to this magnificent poem. I found his poem so moving that I decided to use part of it as an epigraph, dusting off a draft I had written a few months back; it is now the title poem of my collection-- "A Mocking Bird Sings Bel Canto" (see below).

Yesterday the manuscript fell into place after all of my four-hours a day hard work; suddenly I saw how the relationships among the poems and the sections could work.  I told a friend that this book is my love letter to the world.  I am very aware that lyric poetry even in the open line is not in vogue in the literary establishment. But I wrote the book that was in me to write, and I hope that at some point it will fall on the right ears and eyes.

I have mentioned off and on at my main blog Loquaciously Yours that I have returned to serious writing-- most of each day-- after many years raising Golden Retrievers and being caught up in other things.  I had to give myself permission to start a blog that day last January.

Since that time I've written a number of essays/posts about all kinds of things, one memoir, a novel and now pulled together with new work and from my M.F.A. thesis, two collections of poetry.

I have felt the press of time; I turn 62 this week.  The past twenty years have flown by in the proverbial twinkling of an eye.  It turned out to be a good thing to write and put things away and then return to them much later, but I wouldn't want to sleep away the time I have left!  Please do visit me at Loquaciously Yours as well as stopping by this blog; my new "title poem" follows.


.                                                A Mocking Bird Sings Bel Canto

"Demon or bird! (said the boy's soul,)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping, now I have heard
you,
Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,
And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder
and more sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die."
From "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

You came to singing

As a child, voice made

Of light and air

caroling and plain
In the mirror

Little imitative bird

Velvet snare of impulse

Binding you to vision

Now, Puccini at twilight: 
two voices

Rising and falling 
in the depths of the Met’s 
red brocade mouth--Pinkerton 

and that princess

Gheorghiu, together

In the background the pyre

Of conquest-- 


Butterfly dies for love

Beautifully: at the apogee

The moon shatters 
in her throat

The critic next to you nods:

Please, tremulous diva

Die again—your hair a mane

Down your back, the knife

Glinting in your small 
ivory hand

ii

You leave the opera 
replenished

Arms in your silk jacket swinging

Freely, clutch with its rhinestone

And the cheap single ticket

Drifts away into the river 
along the curb

You do not see

That the sidewalk 
is underwater, 
that lamps glow at the bottom

In a bistro you drink a glass

Of forgetfulness

The stranger next to you

Looks, looks away.

Back out to the street

You reorient yourself

By the few visible stars

Unbind your hair; you walk 
quickly

There is someone you know

Too well 
In the undulating windows

iii

Placer y lagrimas, pleasure 
and tears

You retreat to your lair

Stripping yourself of that tasteful

Boutique suit, those low-heeled

Dancing shoes

  

And then some light rain

Within, a scrim

Of batik trees leaning 
out of the past--

Branches ghosts of loves

Only half-forgotten

Voice rising

With unfettered and unscored

Yearning that measure 


For measure

Cascades like jubilant water

Through the dark.