Spring 2009 Issue

Joseph Voth - Living with Noise

he one crazy man
our small town could afford
wore earmuffs in the summer
to keep the loudest voices
from entering his head,
or, some guessed,
to keep those already there
from acts of mutiny,
as if drawing
the mind’s curtain closed
could quiet
an audience of hecklers
or silence the lone tuba
lost among the reed instruments.
I now live in a city
where crazy men
trump similes,
both in numbers and craziness;
on any given night
I can go to where they sleep
and hear them sing
themselves into dreaming
with the same arguments
against life
I mute into thinking.
It’s all a matter of volume
you see,
or interior decoration.
One friend tells me
that woodpeckers battered the eves
while she slept
and became the mallet-faced
hogs of her nightmare.
Another’s neighbor broke
the dawn with hammers
and home repair
until my friend prayed
for his death.
It’s strange to long for the same sleep
where we fault beasts
for birds’ work
and work itself for our waking
but what of it?
The untidy life
is the one we’re offered,
full of ravenous birds
and wandering horns,
the one we come into crying,
as if we know
there will never be enough.