I thought it would be warmer today
I regretted my gloves (folded
in the lap of the dreaming
Awakened One of Tools, on the
dusty workbench)
before I had gone a block. My jacket
fluttered in the wind, and my eyes wept.
It is your birthday today,
and all week I have thought
of flowers, calligraph'd poems,
phone calls at dawn, inviting you to see
the sunrise I gave you.
But the dawn runs bleak, colorless,
ancient. I saw last week
an opossum so elderly,
confused, and stiff, that
he walked witless in the daylight,
limping blind, with his teeth bared,
in the gutter.
Carefully I lock the U
around the bike's tenderest parts
with numb hands. I will give you nothing today.
There is nothing that it makes sense to give,
there is no kindness compares to silence.
In my ears the silver tinnitus
soars into a higher song. I wipe
my eyes carefully. I
regret my gloves.
7 comments:
Only regret lost gloves.
It may (or may not) help in understanding this to know that I'm thinking of the theory of tinnitus which says it is a response to being deaf to certain range of sound frequencies: the auditory processor knows there ought to be sound in those ranges, that the silence can't be right, so it "fills in" with something, more or less the same way the visual processor fills in the eyes' blind spots.
Does "soars into higher song" refer to that moment when the tinnitus seems suddenly to start again, like a reset recording, as though it hadn't been there the moment before?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/science/05obhear.html?_r=1&ref=science
I was assuming the rhyme for glove.
Yes. One of the many arresting qualities of tinnitus is that while it's always there if I listen for it, I very often have the sense that it *wasn't* there a moment before I started paying attention. Which may be in fact exactly how it works: that the act of tuning into those empty frequencies is precisely what kicks off the tinnitus. So you would never be able to be aware of its absence, except by the sort of peripheral vision that allows you to catch sight of a very dim star with the corner of your eye.
Thanks for the link, Zhoen! That's fascinating.
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