A mockingbird leans from the walnut, bellies, riffling white, accomplishes his perch upon the eaves. I witnessed this act of grace in blind California in the January sun where families bicycle on Saturday and the mother with high cheekbones and coffee-colored iridescent hair curses her child in the language of Pushkin– John, I am dull from thinking of your pain,
this mimic world which make us stupid with the totem griefs we hope will give us power to look at trees, at stones, one brute to another like poems on a page. What can I say, my friend? There are tricks of animal grace, poems in the mind we survive on. It isn't much. You are 4,000 miles away & this world did not invite us.