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.

At Columbia Harry Bauld was twice first-team All-Ivy shortstop and broke Lou Gehrig’s records. Unfortunately they were his academic records. A writer, painter, translator and teacher in the Bronx, he has won awards for work that has appeared in numerous journals in the U.S. and the U.K. He was included by Matthew Dickman in the anthology Best New Poets 2012 (UVa Press) and has performed in New York and elsewhere as a magician and jazz pianist.