Mockingbird II

How perfectly he has mastered the car alarm, jangling us from sleep. Later his staccato scatters smaller birds that landed on the wire beside him. Perhaps the key to success is imitation, not originality. Once, when the cat slinked up the orange tree and snatched a hatchling, the mockingbird turned on us, marked us for revenge. For two whole weeks he dive bombed whenever I ventured out the screen door lured by his call: first tricked into thinking the soft coo was a mourning dove courting, next drawn by the war cry of a far larger animal. He swooped from one splintered eave, his mate from the other, aiming to peck out my eyes, to wrestle the baby from my arms, to do God knows what with that newborn.