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.