In Praise of Noise

James Arthur Click to read more...

James Arthur has received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship and a Discovery/ The Nation Prize. His first poetry collection, Charms Against Lightning, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Ploughshares and Narrative. In 2012 he will be in residence at the Amy Clampitt House in Lenox, Massachusetts.

          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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