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Melophobia
Fear of Music
They’ll
tell you there are only two ways: flawed
windpipes that knock like water mains behind
thin walls or else a lovely sound like wood
winds sanded smooth – no in-betweens. They’ll
find
you practicing your scales, determined not
to fail. A voice too frail, too thin, begin
again, again, again, now overwrought,
now undersung. Not done. They recommend:
just sound as much like you as possible.
But we know possible is slippery.
Your Oklahoma: like an ocean filled
with earth. My Texas: ocean filled with sky.
Sing into a conch: you’ll sound like yourself.
Sing into a conch: you’ll sound like the sea.
The
Prolific
The red, the blue, the streak of orange stripe –
they’re everywhere, and so are sound and scent
and still, if all were still the air would pipe
its tactile breath nonstop like bakeries’ bent
street fans would waft exhaust of bread at us
each morning, as we passed on 23rd.
He’d tell me less is more. I’d say: I’ve
heard.
But I’d want more; felt there was more of less
for me those days than more of more. The swirl
of world went on, but at the center of
this narcissistic universe: one girl,
dead-stopped. Red cup. Blue shirt. I moved
my hand through orange streaks of hair – a shift
in space that couldn’t rift. My eye bereft.
In space that cannot rift, the eye’s bereft
of stimuli. A boy was here, but left
an empty seat. And I can’t stare at space
that once was filled and not perceive the trace
of stirring lingering. That boy. We walked
down 23rd a lot, and talked, and smoked
and looked at all there was to see, the more
of street urbanity. We walked the floor
of gum coating the ground, built toss by toss;
the buildings that had sacrificed their gloss
to sheets of smog. It calmed me: a world built
of what’s beneath it, never done, the silt
foot-pounded down by countless hurried feet.
He couldn’t love it. It was not complete.
He couldn’t love me – I was not complete
the way his wishful eye completed me,
subtracting toward an ideal sum. I’d see
myself lost part by part: white neck, large feet,
wild hair – erased – a disappearing hand
pressed lightly to transparent collarbones.
He wished for tides, forgot they caused sea stones
to wane and yield. But glass worn down to sand,
if not as beautiful, is also not
as delicate. I couldn’t disappear
beneath his blink. Instead I found the spot
on 23rd where, when the sun struck clear
glass buildings, streets appeared to multiply.
And then a thousand of me walked away.
A thousand other men could walk away
from me a thousand times, and I would pay
them hardly any mind. The only one
who matters is the one I left. He’s gone
the way a flash of bright light goes: still there
in afterimages, a shadow where
a statue stood. But 23rd street’s full
of immigrants who see this way: the pull
of memory placing a tree where raised wires
ought to be; a river where the paved
roads actually run. And if they can erase
a city with nostalgia’s sight – replace
the truth with things they loved – I wonder what
my own imperfect eye could substitute.
My own imperfect eye is destitute
when faced with all there is to see. He’d said:
just close them, then. I’d say: I can’t
– minute
details I missed would haunt me when I did.
But now I do. I walk down 23rd
Street blind, a movie played on loop
beneath my lids. A vast, prolific world
swells all around me, kaleidoscope
of sound and scent redoubling, and I
know nothing of it, only see in flash-
backs. Empty seat. Raised cup, a grip belied
by see-through hands. Unfinished buildings slashed
by vivid streaks of sun; a city wiped
too clean of reds, of blues, of orange stripes.
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