Remarkable Acoustic Talents

The poet misspoke: there is no lone

cicada singing to himself;

each is a multitude.

But we may ask

whether he hears

his own voice, or the multitude,

or anything he might be said to recognize.

And we learn that like Odysseus

his auditory organs must be damped

to save him from

in this case, his own deafening decibels,

trembling  in the wave

in which tries
to sing loudest,

to be heard alone
in that surging song

that comes to us as one great rustling roar.

The female does not sing

but waits on the leafy shore

of an ocean of resonant systems

contracting  and releasing

their tymbals, in no real order,

deep in the pulse of mating.

Tymbals, we learn, are membranes

that resound within the living husk

attached to apodemes

(stronger, stiffer than our vertebrate tendons

but like them, storing elastic energy)

that buckle inward in sequence

posterior to anterior,

each inward pull yielding a train of pulses,

the outward buckling, the release, just one;

the waveform starts

with an inward-going rarefaction

(that is, a thinning out of air)

followed by outward compression,

then decay,

approximately exponential.

After the first pulse, if the next

come quickly

it finds itself beginning

on the inward-going half-cycle

of the one before,

so pulse on pulse become

coherent waveform.

But coherence is lost
if the preceding pulse decays
below a tenth of its peak amplitude.

A difficult singing.

Each cicada among the thousands,

ears sealed, just pulls in, lets go

pulls in, lets go,

fifty times a second, more,

wakened only by the wing flicks

of the attracted female, silent but visible

as she flutters in the shadowy trees,

beckoning that one that seems to her

loudest, or most coherent,

among the rustling mass:

the one, the irresistible one.

In the Museum of the Resistance

In the museum of the resistance
the last room opens on the first,
you can see the end from the beginning,
as they who are captured here—
behind the glass, in shoes and pipes and radios,
in typed words that dent paper and stagger slightly,
in grainy film where they make again the again the same gestures,
in snapshots from which
one face, one thought, alarm, or careless attention,
dimly reaches out—they could not do.

Around to the right we follow
from case to case,
exhibits of impossible choices.
We feel the sudden ridiculous entrance of the tyrant,
the boots and iron,
and like the men in suits and honorable collars,
stiff at the civic table, we ask—what?
of what inscrutable fate, as certainty slips away?

The snow queen’s mirror breaks in slow motion,
sends slivers of ice to the heart;
human blood should melt them.
It does in the children's story.
But this is a story in which
horrors may be avoided if imagination refuses.
The blank brutality seeming, and perhaps in fact,
random: what are the odds? what do we know?
In this story some have a courage that will be mad,
that will be an equal violence.

Some will wear the uniform and some
will watch the uniforms, with out without expression,
and some will bargain and some will plot
in cellars and woodlots
 destruction by any means.

In white churches the citizens
may turn in their hymnals to instructions
for making bombs out of household objects,
mechanical pencils, say,
the shaft filled with cupric chloride that
when crushed with pliers or the heel of a boot,
begins to eat the wire holding the striker,
so the striker may fly
down the hollow center of the detonator,
to the waiting percussion cap.

A bridge goes down;
ten citizens are taken and hanged,
pictures are displayed. Officials plead for calm.
Death calls for death, stroke for stroke.
What is the weight of a gesture?
Or the story of a gesture, for we are told
a secret: the king
never wore the star.

Here in the last room is a letter
smuggled out of the cell, by whom?
The silvery snail trace of pencil and human hand:
Mother, it says,
I am to be executed, at dawn tomorrow.
As I love life, I know that what we do
is right. It must go on,
it will go on. I have no regret,
I am not afraid (or something like that, in Danish).

It is a mystery.
From the stained glass window
a blue, equable radiance washes over
this one and the ones beside it
on stands like alters.

Forgetting

He has walked all day with the hills before him
and the distant houses
white and square
against sun-darkened trees.
The sun's disk, on edge,
touches the disk of the world,
which grows rounder as the sun slips down.
He wanted to see that town
in the full light of day, in a beautiful season,
and he is almost there.
But something has changed
in the aspect or the air.
When he looks back he sees
the path dissolving,
the green and dusty sea closing over
what eddies his feet stirred in passing.
He wants to know
by what steps exactly he came here.
He can’t remember the feeling of damp grasses
or how the day warmed and opened.
He has only some sense of ground
traversed, of gravity
overcome, of triumph in approaching
those hills by such and such a time.
And he is almost there,
but the shadows behind spread long fingers and he stands
perplexed, his shadow before him.
Suddenly, more than the place ahead,
he wants what he has been leaving.
He thinks there was a dog
by the gate, yes, and bright chicory
where the road widened,
a tree with remarkable bark,
and more—a distant chimney
with smoke and walkers
going the other way, who raised their hands in greeting—
but then,
 he is not certain about the walkers.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam isn’t a bad puzzle of a city.
All the parts seem to fit, the water and the sky
alike bright blue or filtered silver
and the tall skinny houses
bowed over the water, as if to see themselves,
but really to make room for pianos on hoists
and huge wooden cupboards, too broad
and high for the puzzle doors punctuating
storybook facades. The wonder
is how the tallest of Europe’s citizens,
the most upright, fit through.
Or slip down the narrow canalside landing
behind each house, to the slender boats
that fill the water grid, like fish in Eden,
all types and sizes, fearless, although
everyone knows the sea’s power,
held back for now.

Through the mirror of travel
the room becomes subtly different.
Reverse-handedness is the magic,
is all it takes, and there blooms
a world in which it is interesting
to imagine living. In which
Everything fits, tulips and marijuana
and stronger stuff; pissing statues,
whores of all descriptions, some in windows
and some in back rooms without their passports.
Anne Frank’s chestnut, secretly rotted,
was taken down by wind, and headlines linked
its felling to the rise of Holocaust denial,
but rotting—
trees above water and below water the piers
of charming nestled dwellings—
is what time does. And from her window too
the world spreads its beauty like a picnic
on a bright cloth, for an afternoon.

With David at the Green Mill (Patricia Barber Quartet 2/2010)

I think I remember it all—
Winter, late night; salted sidewalks?
Wind and snow pushed past us through the door
right up to the man taking the money.
He winced. He had a barroom face
in the windows’ greenish glow.
We moved through darkness past darker heads,
low chatter, brushing shoulders;
bodies pressed together in the narrow room.
That table at the front was luck!
You sat back to the band, admired
the tatty glamor,
the painted plaster caryatids,
and the hint
of old tobacco in the boozy air.

When the set started something electric
squealed and was silenced. I remember
her arms lifted; her long fingers
glowed
with the rose of blood
lit from within and gilded
by the light from the bar
where ranks of bottles and
varnished mahogany
swam in the long mirrors.
Yes, her arms lifted and without hurry
moved through silence; her fingers
were articulated embers, flinging sparks.

She played, she sang; would you say,
the voice was smoke or silk?
A river unrolling itself, surprising itself?
The bass thrummed
and the drums whispered
suggestion and the guitar
picked up a tangent
and it moved among them
rocking to and fro,
leaping and leaning together across wide water,
limb following limb and reassembling,
momentum a pure good gift.
Their smiles met in the dark.

The crowd sat sighing, and swaying.
We shared that amber orbit—
we could not stop
grinning and tapping the table top.
You said it made you want to play again.

Two weeks later you slipped
to the bathroom floor, and away
from every sound
from every sort of light,
beyond the reach those
unimaginably many reflecting surfaces
beyond the blackest black.

I’ll save it as long as I can,
ripples wide and wider in the beaten air
and we together in the circle.
It doesn’t quite mesh. I try.
Now I have to get back
to what I am doing.
And the glittering sand
slips through the narrow glass
to build a shining mountain and bring it down.

About Deep Woods

Ragged billows of spruce and beech
catch the wind,
swell and shudder,
against the high sky
from which blue through quivering needles
falls to sepia.

In these woods there are no mirrors,
no human face or gesture,
an utter absence of machine,
silence you have longed for, without knowing it,
silence you did not imagine.

In these woods silence moves away
from where you stand, darkly through its layers;
it lifts the brown light in which birds
call and reply, secret flutes and oboes
in the resounding lofts.

There are illusions of hallways
leafed and easily lost.
There are signs of a sort:
a bleached and broken urchin,
a ghost ring where birches lived,
saplings narrowed to bare poles
that climb straight up the dark air.

The great gray granite lies obdurate
under velvet mosses;
brown leaves quilt its hollows.

A twig stirs. Your eyes open
to the gleam of a dappled wood frog
materializing in the fringe of fern,
one black eye in profile,
stopped in mid-motion.

Here is respite
from being seen or known;
nothing is about you,
and like the frog,
attentive, quiet,
wanting nothing,
you begin to disappear.

Terroir

They have given us our lovely flavor.
The umami of our unwashed limbs
has risen through the bedrock of themselves,
the native soil and weather
they carried in their ceaseless movement.
What trace dye might show
the westward swaths, the starting and stopping,
the plume of blood, ending here.

And we find, though vanished, untraceable
their mute weight begins to bend us;
they disturb us with suggestions.
They do not come in dreams
or dressed as we might know them,
but in static, in distracted air
in the narrow stillness before sleep,
or as we sit with hot tea and blanket
and the doorbell rings;
and ignoring possible danger we open the door.
The peephole useless where three ears of corn
hang to recall past harvests,
so all that can be seen
are yellow teeth, large but amiable.
And just as we look the street door closes.
We glimpse through the glass
the back of someone who may have had
a message, or not. That’s how it often is.

But sometimes clearly, as today,
in the first snow becoming mysteriously visible
more than silent, silence incarnate,
a shifting scrim framing beyond this window
Finland a century gone
a stark farm yard and the girl
not yet my grandmother
who has left school after eight years
with fifty years of poetry in her head
and now must milk the cows whose breathing
steams the cowshed windows white.
Where she steps the mud is not quite hard.
A different stillness stops her, lifts her eyes
to the wide pale sky; she waits
and slow observable flakes
like fish scales scattered by the blade,
like salt froth on a high cold sea,
like feathers,
like fragments of white pages,
whirl one by one and drift and touch
the roof, her upturned face, the freezing earth.