SHORT POEMS AND SPIN-OFFS: EMILY AND THE EXPERIENCE OF SURPRISE
by Denise Levertov
Page 6
This one is called "The Absentee."
Uninterpreted, the days
are falling.
The spring wind
is shaking and shaking the trees.
A nest of eggs,
a nest of deaths.
Falling
abandoned.
The palms rattle, the eucalypts
shed bark and blossoms. Uninterpreted.
I was thinking of that phrase and at this moment I cannot remember whose phrase it was -- William James, was it? -- about the unexamined life. This is a poem about a mockingbird, "The mockingbird of mockingbirds". Each year, I teach for three months in California, at Stanford, and there a lot of birds, singing birds, that I hear, January through March. This is a memorial poem for a particular mockingbird that I heard for two years and then no more.
THE MOCKINGBIRD OF MOCKINGBIRDS
A greyish bird
the size perhaps of two plump sparrows,
fallen in some field,
soon flattened, a dry
mess of feathers-
and no one knows
this was a prince among his kind,
virtuoso of virtuosos,
lord of a thousand songs,
debonair, elaborate in invention, fantasist,
rival of nightingales.
