Tune

i.

if sound were a chamber, walls with windows,

(like the inside of my head)

the sounds my mind makes would be

more crisp than yowl

more staccato than inflammatory

an incisive moment of all-sound

cacaphonic not symphonic

i don't know where to carry the boombox of me to

where to play the music that is me, that my thinking

produces. it feels like there's no where

in the freeway and mower hum a day world

airplane guzzlebuzz

for me, perhaps the faroff noon birdsong

is closer, better than clocktick

maybe i sound

more like apple blossoms, less like garbage truck

more rockshine, less garlic press

more chimetone, less crow caw

more magnolia flower spires and azalea blasts, less truck roar and brakegash

ii.

mother dying in a hospital bed

dying more quickly than you or i

at the asymptotic almost-null point

where time expands outward

bridging monstrous chasms

this is when all sound falls away

when time opens up like the ruddy giddy

shutter-stop caesura

between standing up

and finding yourself passed out on the floor

five nurses clucking

iii.

may time always carry us so,

some times a bridge, some time is a gurney

comes to a close, pushes us through the pinprick

(needleprick)

into something more spacious than this, something

fabulous, more like flying carpets, less like hospital gowns

iv.

when my mind, the sound chamber

of me, recomposes itself

after this rattleblast hospital trauma

(only a moment of witnessing the endless trauma that is her daily ken)

settles, how will this have changed my whistle?

what will the acoustics be like

in my headstrong head?

i pray for choral tuning, bell-like, amphoric

so that is my word, my one word, my fe-fye-fo

TUNE TUNE TUNE TUNE

blow across the lid of me

wind of making

tune me whole