"Possible Companion"
"The mockingbird stayed for months in the ligustrum, blips,
and screams--
I couldn't get a thing done.
And though I know control is an illusion,
I'd go outside and talk to it in the sort of shallow sun.
Week after week of helping it along
in the powdery white tree, like helping
the new kid in seventh grade, that awkward mix of sympathy
and greed that always rises from the deepest place,
and I thought I could help my dead friend, too,
though her new dead voice was terribly full.
But I feared I was controlling her even in heaven,
but her voice had had to be stopped for me to speak at all.
The death did not subtract.
It added something.
Her death made me whole."