Harlequin cardinal in oak,
plumage split laterally—left,
the bright red of a male
who needs to impress; right,
pale taupe of a female
who needs camouflage to roost.
Not alone, just lonesome,
not once letting researchers
hear your coo the whole month
they were able to follow you,
no suitors to shoo or pale
feathery breasts to woo.
Is this solitary cardinal
beyond socializing for better,
or worse? Or worse, was there
never an option—no songs, ever?
Ever sounds like a long time,
but perhaps time works in ways
not as linear as we normally consider;
perhaps higher dimensions
fold timelines like origami.
A comforting thought, almost
communal. One wonders
whether the bird’s plight
is analogous or just reminiscent
of the fifty-two hertz whale,
who at least has a name
if not yet an image of his face,
whose song is the only oceanic
call pitched just so, making him
easy for us to track, but also
leaving him with no one to sing to
with his foreign-sounding gibberish,
just deeper than a tuba. In 1969
a cardinal was documented
in the same region, with the reciprocal
remarkable plumage, its split flipped
with the male’s gaudiness on the right
and the female’s discreteness left.
Maybe the two shared some point
on time’s origami and were, as one,
not lonely but fully content—or—
perhaps each were whole, alone.