The sound begins with a furnace
clicking awake in a two-room house, answered
by a few, then more, voices: gauges,
and old-fashioned watches ticking out of synch, in growing number,
so their tip-tip-tip fattens to a moan, joined
by a horn’s upbeat honkity-honk, then ringtones and speakers
rehearsing drawn horsehair, air in a woodwind, mimicking
a hand slapping a polyester drumhead, but unlike
these coarser frictions, playing the same, every time.
A car door bangs, a jackhammer hammers, and a bassline
purrs through a wall. The sound congeals,
sucking in more, a mechanical syrup in an IV drip, the automatic
ruckus of a robotic ocean, a symphony
no one wrote, confounding every pattern:
teach me the song that no one can sing, someday
to be the song of everything.
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I’m delighted that Shenandoah has gone on line. So far I’ve only read Linda Pastan’s poem of the week and this one, and I’ve loved both enough to pass them on. Reading your journal could take quite a while at this rate. Both these poems make me sit and ponder a moment after my first thought, “Wish I’d said that.”
Thank you. I enjoy the experience of noise which is cacophonous to compose to but word by word elicits such pleasure. I must share this with my musician friends who don’t read poetry.