What comes easiest, even against my will, is song:

a few notes suffice to summon the whole of Bonnie Raitt’s

“Something to Talk About,”  unless it’s exactly those

that carry “I feel so foolish, I never noticed

 

You’d act so nervous”  which I always hear

in the background of “Blurred Lines,”  

the suspect Robin Thicke, though when I return

to find the part that echoes Raitt

 

it’s not there, it must be

that both songs rely heavily on a five-syllable phrase

(“People are talking”  — “I know you want it”)

There’s that reality

 

show where stars compete

on the principle

that songs are known

by smallest quote, and I wish

 

the same were true of bird song, that, having once

heard an owl, having fallen to one’s knees

in a New Hampshire forest on a day of deafening

nationalism, say, in order to perform the imitation

 

of devotion, one can summon the owl’s song

as readily as they can the smell of the man, the cotton

whose elastic wore out years earlier, taste

of the rain, tug at [sound of fireworks fades to quiet]

 

hair, but no, to hear the owl they have to

navigate to an application for bird identification,

install the “bird pack”  for “US: Northeast,”

accidentally remember the man

 

they dated because he lived with a woman

they loved, look up the town where they met

at the old Shaker house, where he cooked

for his dad’s music camp—Portsmouth—

 

and find a list of owls that might have been

in the area in July 2017: the eastern screech-owl,

the great horned owl, and the barred owl,

but all of them classified as “rare,”  such that they start

 

to believe they inserted this owl phrase

into an otherwise unpleasant memory, and then to regret

that they could not remember the song itself, only

its having happened. But let us, in their stead, listen to all three:

●

An Eastern Screech-Owl’s song recorded
in Maryland in 1998 sounds almost like a horse whinnying
—it starts off a bit low, warbles up to a whistle
in B, grumbles back down, like a cat abandoning his complaint

●

A Great Horned Owl’s song recorded
in California in 1954 sounds much more owl: four seconds
of punctuated little hoots, cheering or spooking, followed by
10 seconds of silence, before the hoots return, each one

lingering a bit longer, repeating on a loop: duh duh-dum,

duhhhh, duhhhh (— – – –– ––), (I was taking tap

-dancing before I broke my foot, trying to relearn

how one describe beats; that would be useful now)

●

A Barred Owl’s song, recorded
in Oregon in 1992, averages these
two: the horse is trying
to run away, maybe from a fire

or from a bad man, but it’s caught

in a musical, and so it has to register

its complaint in a more complicated variant

on the Great Horned’s rhythm:

 

we have six seconds of these neighs—described

typically as a 8-9 note “Who cooks for you? Who cooks

for you-all?”  pattern, I learn, which makes me want

to revise my description of the Great Horned

 

to give it words. As with all creatures,  

their monologues sound different from their duets,  

but since this is a fantasy owl, near someone alone  

in the woods listening to its call, and since they do not sing  

 

back, unlike reality, where they would hear 

explosions and the inane sentences of a man they’d be coming 

to despise, I will not add in another owl, I will not  

imagine that two lovers sang to each other, instead  

 

I’ll wish these were the sounds, had they heard them,  

that often crowd my own mind, rather than every note  

to the Spice Girls “When Two Become One,”  or the third  

verse of “On Eagles’  Wings,”  “You need not fear the terror of the night,” 

 

among the other sounds I need no help  

recalling: dishes washed in love or rage 

ring clear despite the separation  

of a closed door, a ceiling, and 30 years;  

 

a bow that needs rosin dragged across  

a viola’s strings, my teacher’s lilt; myself  

in sobs and pleasure, and their difference,  

and all the songs a lover ever sent, and every note 

 

an enemy Monsignor hit when he began to sing  

the eucharist instead of simple chant; or the stirring  

sounds of youth, say—the heart beating against the pillow 

I so often mistook for home invaders,  

 

marching up the steps—and once I tried to write  

a children’s book about this sound  

and the story I made up to cope with it, which I’ll put it here:  

 

There Are No Spiders: a children’s book

 

It’s only the sound of my heartbeat, right?

 

Mom says the mattress “amplifies”  it.

But what if it’s a man—no, a thing—coming up the stairs?

 

I would turn on the light to look

 

but I don’t want to see the room full of spiders.

I know the spiders are after me.

 

This morning, I kicked an anthill. It was an accident.

The poor ants took off in different directions.

 

Some of them went further into the ground, to tell the worms what I had done.

 

And the scared ants

—the children, and the smart adults—

went down too, to look for safety.

 

Some of them went streaming single-file to other ant-hills,

and some of them spread the gossip to the bees,

the spiders,

and the cicadas.

 

Now all the bugs in town are watching me

waiting for their revenge.

 

My big sister helped me write an apology.

I tucked it in the crack in the sidewalk where the anthill used to be.

But the spiders might not have read the letter yet!

 

They’re probably waiting at the foot of the bed,

or just outside the door.

 

I have to risk it.

 

I’ll stand on the edge of bed,

reaching out toward the door,

feeling for the light-switch.

 

Just as I flip the switch, I lose my balance

and fall on the floor with a loud crash.

 

At first, the light is too bright to see.

 

I scramble back onto the bed, shaking my arms and legs

to make sure I don’t take any spiders with me.

 

When I open my eyes, I realize

there are no spiders.

 

But the sound of the monster’s steps returns,

this time, even louder.

 

“Are you OK, Daniel? Did you fall out of bed again?”  

 

My dad, the monster, stands in the doorway, looking scared and silly with shaving cream on half of his face.

 

“I think so, Dad. But . . .”  

 

“What is it, Danny?”  

 

“Will you make sure there are no monsters in the house?”  

 

“Go back to sleep, Danny. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

 

I settle back into bed, listening carefully for the voices underneath it.

 

etc. The organ seems controllable  

by the same mechanism as cars 

in Carnival of Souls, when the driver  

[Silence from the radio] puts the key in  

 

the ignition and the camera cuts to the church 

organ’s knobs, where Mary (“I don’t seem capable  

of being very close to people”) 

was still (it’s early) master of sound,  

 

though soon she would be begging  

for listeners, or at least the birds  

whose chirping signals that sound is back, 

a stand-in for Francis, who did not hear  

 

the starlings’  own gospel, and soon  

the car itself would cede control 

to some dance hall of necromantic clowns— 

so here, the organist (an old film job) finds herself  

 

a dead mic, and goes looking for sound, like  

me today, when I am homing 

in on noise. Among the senses, however  

artificially fifthed, sound is the most  

 

intrusive, the medium for unwanted or at least  

unintentionally stored memories—scrolling social  

media I find a donkey singing to the strolling  

passersby (whose stumbling on ass  

 

song is more admirable for happening  

in person, in animal) in an F# that, when it warbles,  

borders on the coming G, and I recognize this  

as identical to the opening note  

 

sung by the soprano in Mortan Feldman’s “Neither,”   

which adapts Beckett’s poem (meaning the donkey 

is gearing up to say “absent for good / from self 

and other / then no sound”) and I  

 

want everyone I love to share my sense  

that this guy’s not merely singing, that he chose  

to move from selves and unselves impenetrable 

(it’s a heavy-handed poem, if I’m honest) 

 

with that glacial pace that strips libretto  

of its words, but Feldman does not own this  

note, so sound is much less  

frequently the sense I’m trying to recall 

 

[“It’s like a big ball of concrete  

that falls into a metal well 

which is surrounded by seawater.”] 

than smell, which would enable to me to find  

 

the perfume I noticed on a nape, or touch,  

which, had it imprinted, might make the pleasure  

of a lover possible in their absence, or sight,  

the guidance of which not only helps  

 

me find my way home, were I to remember which bodega  

marked my corner, but also to make friends, recalling  

the face, finally, of the nice person with whom  

I shared some party’s corner, though I suppose  

 

I’d also like to recognize their voice (if I heard  

a friend from childhood laughing at the Krogers  

would I pause? I can’t even recall friends’  pre-t 

voices) and so helps me hear 

 

the lilac premise: not just to enter a trance 

that enables the recovery of senses  

and their memory, here, fourth, sound, or to  

develop a guide for sound’s future  

 

memorization—today I understand 

that is not my real purpose, not the uncovering  

of memories, lost or otherwise  

obscured, nor the science  

 

of preparing sensory information  

for future recall, since sound clarifies 

that I am not hoping to remember more, I am  

just trying to focus, to put a filter  

 

on awareness, one way to tolerate the mind  

and “mindfulness”  by narrowing its scope, like memorizing  

“Meditations in an Emergency,”  a poem that was not written  

to offer anxious readers prayers 

 

when their feelings emerge, I know, but Frank  

cannot stop me from saying “It’s not that  

I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth.” 

to myself, whenever I’d prefer those lines to life, often, and I confess 

 

also when I need to stomach duration, a stalled  

train, sex that goes on past my jaw’s  

capacity, a plank to hold, a bout of cramps, whatever I know 

always ends, in time, and Shiv says that,  

 

because he used my recording to get these lines in his own heart,  

it’s my voice that replays them there (though last year’s, a little  

higher), like I’m the poem’s Bernhardt, and we sit watching  

movies in a genre I’m trying to invent, like I’m Cavell,  

 

the Searching for Sound plot, Tilda  

Swinton as Jessica sitting with the perhaps imagined  

sound technician at the university clicking on sound  

files trying to re-experience the sonic boom that tolls  

 

for her alone in Apitchapong’s Memoria; Cate  

Blanchett as Lydia scouring  

the apartment for a sound that interrupts  

sleep, or pausing the jog  

 

to listen to Field’s insertion of a clip  

of screaming from The Blair  

Witch Project in Tár; John 

Travolta as Jack, a sound effects  

 

technician who records real murder  

when trying to catch owls’  hoots  

to soundtrack a fictional one; all movies  

depict people in costume wandering  

 

around trying to find the one responsible  

for the nondiegetic songs bursting  

into tears as their trains cross  

over the water—it does not matter  

 

what genre you invent, the anticipatory lumping  

of works of art into categories makes them more  

interesting to look at, in that you see both  

the film itself and its memories of other films, where women,  

 

in this case, have something in their ears  

they have to find, or husbands to remember why  

they love, or guts to open up by slashing  

knives, held by men who seem to want  

 

each other, or cowboys to cry over. Now I see  

other sonic genres, like books structured around misrecognition, “Miss  

Earrings”  as speech-to-text app interpreted in my seaside  

chat with Charles, or in Robert Glück’s I,  

 

Boombox, a memoir by way of misrecognition, what Bob writes  

down when he misreads, which reminded me 

of Artemidorus, ancient dream interpreter, instructing his son  

who was to inherit his customers  

 

(like I was once in a dream where I sought my crush  

at an unpleasant surprise party, hosted by mysterious acquaintances,

in a large, bright, gallery, in which the art comprised enlarged collages  

of my childhood journals, and when I had almost found them, someone came  

 

to tell me a “singing rose”  was waiting—I walked toward glass  

doors at the party’s entrance, where a delivery person handed me a single rose  

and sang a prophecy: “Return to the homeland of the one  

you love and join their family business”)  

 

on dream interpretation: “now too I advise you  

to make use of transposition [anagrams] when you are interpreting  

someone else’s dreams and want to appear smarter than the others.  

But do not use it under any circumstances  

 

when you are interpreting for yourself—it will prove a delusion,” 

since customers expect anagrammatic analysis, however 

infrequently it tells the future, unlike  

sonic wordplay, always predictive, as when the man  

 

“dreamt that he was shitting on a bushel of corn,” 

who was then “found to be having sex with his own sister,”   

since the shitting was close in sound, if I buy the footnotes  

of his Interpretation of Dreams, to “sitting,”   

 

so by “s[h]itting on the bushel”—a proverb  

“which means to worry too much about where your next meal  

is coming from,”  he acts “in breach of the moral norms 

universally observed by the Greeks”— 

 

I cannot follow them all the way here, I just mean  

to note that this reliance on the way words sound is repeated  

both in apology (modern readers might struggle  

to believe wordplay matters) and in defense (as evidence  

 

for Artemidorus’s having predicted Freudian  

interpretation, even though he has no interest  

in dreams that reflect wishes, desires, internal  

experiences, focusing only on those that tell  

 

the truth about the future, which means, I think  

we have been putting too much stock  

in sound for at least 2000 years, and might 

move on to some other sense.