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.