The Lyrebird, Hidden. His Dance, Hidden. His Wish, and Every Available Blue No Reason the Sky Is Because

The Lyrebird, Hidden. His Dance, Hidden. His Wish

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 whitenot 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 thingalso hidden from us, the thing famous and forlorn and ecstatic.

His mimic song, an old sound effect record from the '50s, a camera'sclick 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 betterto 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 beto 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 daya kind of pandemic. Too early or too late in those woods.

But we saw a posted alert for the is: this bird can danceand sing his way into that mythic throbof 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 danceand song, his fabulous hind feathers to hypnotize the very onewho 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.

Every Available Blue No Reason the Sky Is Because

the bowerbird's meticulous in love—another sex-u-al in-ter-lude, my old teacher intoned years ago in a class on Tennessee Williams, and we loved that, we'd go crazy. So the bowerbird keeps thieving, rearranging for his starry moment in that picnic grove

• - a shattered blue ballpoint

• - crumpled napkins, all purple

• - a sample-size bottle of blue something

• - blue feathers (maybe a fairy-wren or a kingfisher off course)

• - a child's pacifier, a blue sneaker charm from a bracelet

• - torn bits of the bluest butterfly wings still shimmering as leaves above throw light like the ventriloquist's voice (my bet is a blue triangle, or a Ulysses down from Queensland)

• - bits of blue flowers, fake and real

• - one of those miniature clothespins, or two

• - a broken half crayon papered cobalt

• - that strip ripped from the space between cap and bottle and of course, cap after cap after cap

• - toys, parts of toys: Legos, two blocks—one small, one big, very blue, natch

• - swim goggles' blue foam, a navy babydoll hat, a chewed-up Grover

• - a snail shell, barely blue, in shards

• - the thin ribbon pulled to open a cellophane-like anything, maybe still on cigarette packs (Ha! Like you know. You haven't smoked for fifty years! said the Archangel.)

• - that wee journal you miss, its blurred blue blanking out whatever you wrote, so much rain then into now, your no inkling in this life that

under trees in low scrub your treasure in that homage and lure fronting his love shack's two clumps of tall grass making a narrow space for two birds and the deed, a wish and a lust, a little civilized privacy please, a charming mad answer even with fires about to nightmare.

But why why a glorious blue in the first place, this come-hither to keep a world going I guess I...