to dance, also hidden. But he will get the girl. His featherless, out of the egg pre-wish to dance hidden too. His hidden hidden. His pre-egg in the nest, hidden. Its yolk and white not yet yolk and white, equally hidden. A song the lyrebird steps to and into. By heart and habit. But hidden. Ditto that wild footloose, the very thing also hidden from us, the thing famous and forlorn and ecstatic. His mimic song, an old sound effect record from the '50s, a camera's click then its whirl, a braking truck, a car alarm, a chainsaw plus twenty other birds screaming. Properly: redoes them. His sound bites, the more worldly the better to wow-woo her. Under trees. On the little mound he's cleared to dance. The way ahead circled by thorns and, higher up, stars. How small must one be to be hidden? How large to pass through larger things hidden— sky by clouds, rain by darkness or dawn, hopelessness by the wish for what's next and next. Please. Don't think fire, not yet. Or smoke, flight, the dark all day a kind of pandemic. Too early or too late in those woods. But we saw a posted alert for the is: this bird can dance and sing his way into that mythic throb of lady-business. Some resourceful someone made it precise, and only slightly pornographic the arrow (this way!) to where he-of-the-one-track-mind might stand and hide in the voice of such worldly things. The wooden notice nearly sang what he's up to, the bird's dance and song, his fabulous hind feathers to hypnotize the very one who maybe thought all along she'd have some other fate. Hidden but about to not be, hidden but ancient unto the day. No, we never saw him. Or her, for that matter. But me, a life member, the World Congress of the Disappointed, I understand hope. As in, who knew art was involved? It's a sign.
The lyrebird was in that rarely seen but often imagined multitude that feels, like hopelessness, richly human. My husband and I tracked where it would be, saw signs that might point it out, imagined oddball sounds it could mimic in courtship. So the woods stayed alive, circling a huge absence. Poems give and they take. Maybe as long as I respectfully treated the poem as not-to-happen, it would happen regardless. Marianne Boruch on "The Lyrebird, Hidden. His Dance, Hidden. His Wish"
W. Va. Poet Laureate Marc Harshman Talks Literature "Wendell Berry, who has written as persuasively as anybody I know about what it means to live in this region we call Appalachia, has said that the regionalism he adheres to is simply defined as local life aware of itself. And that seems to me, so very true." viaWV PUBLIC RADIO
What Sparks Poetry: Courtney Angela Brkic on Antun Branko Šimić's "The Return" "To translate Šimić into English requires constant pruning, knocking phrases down to their lowest common denominator. My goal was faithfulness to the original while maintaining the spare intensity of Šimić’s lines, and our conversations often grew heated. I came to crave the moment my father snapped his fingers to demonstrate that I had unlocked the mystery in English."
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