BRIEF HISTORY OF NOISE

by Harry Bauld

Everything was quieter

once. The wind sneaks a pale glance

into my mind, loitering--

and there you are again,

John Keats! You’re never far.

I don’t like the alarm

getting me up from bed

forcing the sheets to follow

the laws of acoustics and counterpoint

and the daily demons

delivering the mail downstairs,

the day already marked up

like a bad essay. Morning larks

and mourning doves can’t

biddle and coo themselves

into poems or mating.

The joy of others makes a racket

you may not like. Ambition

set free in soliloquys makes

a racket. I forget about eternity

whenever I can, hoping

an ascent up some blue-green peak

will leave the racket behind. Escaping a

national border or political party

makes a racket. The exosketeton

of every seed makes a quiet racket.

It seems now in our political

soundscape whenever evil speaks

the racket is easy listening,

like those terrible broadcasts

of the past, dentist soft rock

slick as margarine, everything else

chewed as loud as your grandfather

with his false teeth into lamb chops,

the band width of our tiny terminations

narrowing silently as ash when we awake.

Harry Bauld is a writer and translator in the Bronx, New York.