“The Extermination showed up a few weeks before the machines came to Zanjón de la Aguada and drained the swamp (rank, fetid, black).”
– Mónica-Ramón Ríos tr. Robin Meyers
1.
The sonority arrives.
It arrives from a distance and makes an instrument of bone—the skull bone, the breast bone, the wrist that hefts the handless, heedless watch, its blank face, the little stapes that try to hold the tympanum in place. It may heft a strange burden, a sword of flame, to guard or else to indicate, like a struck plectrum or stuck frenum or with strange gait, a strange gate. Sonority, I
await thee, do sit here in my ossuary, in my sorority of skulls. They all look alike, and like me, ancient, young, and when the wind blows, we all turn like judgemental weeds in an alley. We all suck our teeth and hum. Like a dented dumb antennae, I’ve become
attuned to sonority through hearing loss. It makes my skull a hollow site, and sound a tide that arrives, arrives. My auditory nerves have idiopathically frayed, sound’s pulse won’t translate to audibility, it arrives at a lag or imperfectly, drops, comes back, goes off in some dingy cloud, sinks to die in some ravine. I’ve spent decades guessing. Sometimes I’m right. I study lips for their signs. When the audiologist covers her mouth, she says a word I cannot identify. The eye
in the hasp of her clipboard glints like a bird of prey’s. Evolutionarily, our mammal jawbones moved up to form the ossicles which allow us to hear as we move in space. Not mine. I unlatch my jaw like a snake’s for an egg that stands on its face at the equator. I lift a scope wrong-ways and watch a flea like a camel split a hair. Everything I
know about the world I learned from Looney Tunes. Its laws of chase-and-prey, momentum, gravity, an all-onomatopoeic universe, sound its percussive event. Looney Tunes, my first teacher. Looney Tunes, be my guide in Hell. You share a pattern
with Ovid: an implacable episodicness, each event suspended over the canyon of consequence on the thinnest of wires–and then it snaps. Damage is irreversible, yet the sequence can be run again and again, arrive and arrive with a clang. Consequence. Bang. Imperial entertainments. Wham. Among the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells that as the god Pan chased the nymph Syrinx through a creek, she prayed for escape and was changed to a reed. When Pan crashed through anyway, he broke the reeds in their bed, then on the breeze they sent up their alarm as musical notes. Thus was invented the first flute. An instrument named for him, naturally.
When I think of my own hearing loss, I think of irreparability, a loss that runs only one way, converting my skull to a locked vault, a cave. I like to be alone there, to study how it susurrates. Sonority, that tideline’s arrival, retreat. Other losses are more acute, and I bear them bitterly. Like the constellations in the dark night of Greek thinking, the night sky overwritten with predators and prey. Washed with milk, they sink away to hide behind the sun.
Now an ear worm plays in the bullet-less chamber of my brain: Charlotte Gainsbourg turns to her rock star husband who always gets his way. As he touches down from outer space, she says, of earth, or the cafe–
Did you invent this place, do you owwwn it?
The Francophone actress cannot easily shape the vowel in “own,” but twists her mouth as if she’s dropped an anvil on her toe: ow, ow. With my predator’s eye, I can see her hold it for a hypersecond too long, I can see where sound lies down in that canal, creates a little drag in time which fills with fluid.
This consequence. This catastrophe. This irreversibility.
Do you owwwn it?
—til scene sweeps the line away. Sound decays.
But you can read the signs if you still have eyes in your face.
2. Sonority and Death Styles
I wrote all the poems of Death Styles on the shockwave of catastrophic grief, and I wrote the Death Style for 2/8/21, “Mary Magdalene, Collectible Glasses,” trying to understand the physics of my new, confounding planet, a planet clammy with calamity, with weed beds and reed beds, NICU wards, of cause decoupled from event. The cave where Christ’s body was laid till he rose from the hole in the rock. Mary Magdalene was there at dawn and was the first to see the hole. Can you witness absence? With her mouth in an o, she imitated the hole in the rock, which imitated the hole in Christ’s side. How might sound sag over time in that permanent hole? O, oh, oww, oww. Do you own it? Do you owwwwn it? I tried to slow down the scene to study the way sound under the intense pressure of calamity might warp, go out of synch, get ahead or behind time, go away and re-arrive, resaturate the scene, spring from any orifice, peripheral or sublime, a soda siphon or the wound in Christ’s side. How does the individual body, immobilized by calamity, become a place to which sound and consequence flood? Through what holes might they drain?
