Tinnitus

photo by Joaquín Salido Bello

1.

Near the summit
of Mount Olympus
on a ridge tufted with grass,
there is a riot of tuning forks
quivering in F-sharp,
occasionally spinning,
into the sky
          and down

into the frothing blue
of the Mediterranean,

into the tendrils of kelp,

into the mouths of seahorses
who will go insane
from one-note songs
in their stomachs.

2.

I listen to the electricity of the air,
            the films of Michael Bay
            now a lullaby.

My doctor warns me there is no cure.

It’s like when you notice your phone is ringing, 
and you just know it’s your ex-girlfriend, 
calling to remind you 
            that she misses you,
                        despite all you have done,
            that she loves you so much 
             she cannot stop cutting herself

and the phone will never stop ringing.

3.

There are three categories of deafening silences:

In the first, someone is inserted into nature,
an invisible cage in which the author has removed distraction, 

the finches keeping their beaks shut,
the breeze avoiding the pine needles

to the point in which deafening and its opposite—
what Plato might have called hearingness—
are drawn closed, a fine line of sensation

awakening someone to his fleeting soul,
the delirious ego glimpsing itself
in the distorted dusking of pond water.

In the second, someone is inserted onto a stage,
an invisible cage in which the author has placed an audience.

The speaker grips the cherry wood 
of the podium, only knows

the audience as a succession
of breathing.  He tries

to express
an affirmation 
    of his political,
             his personal,
                         his spiritual 
                                     wavelength,

to hear no echo of response,
the speaker needing the audience 
far more than the audience needs him
in the darkness of the auditorium.

In the third type, a microscopic cicada is inserted
into someone’s ear canal, and then

 the surgeon adds another,
            beginning a colonization,

 the droning chorus blossoming
            in dangerous intervals,

            a grotesque whistle that crisscrosses sound,
            an arpeggiated chord always needling the mind.

            Its waveforms are invisible to the spectrograph.
            The amplitude and the frequency
            form an invisible cage of white noise.

 4.

At the sound of the tone, you will still be alive.

5.

In It Conquered the World,
Lee Van Cleef was an aerospace engineer
who spoke to an exile from Mars,
through a shortwave radio tuned to a frequency
only he could understand.

This presence spoke in murmurs
through an ashen frequency,

basically the sound of a television
in the other room
when, as a child, I was exiled
to bed for the night.

I had only a few clues about what was on:
a theme song,
a plangent voice,

and whatever plot my imagination
could conjure, vans skidding
away from Nazis,
a medical examiner with a gun,
a woman’s scream,

and underneath them,
behind the velvet and oak cathedral
of the family Magnavox,

the glass tubes were bending the ether
to bring this signal into our home,

and the sound of that bending was a whine
over or under the murmurs
and the occasions of static 

                        when the airwaves zagged 
when they needed to
            zig into our house, 
into our ears,

imploring some urgent message,
from a Martian refugee plotting

his dominion over everything
that I cannot understand,

but I listened
so intently.