Читать книгу Tula - Chris Santiago - Страница 8

Audiometry

Because my son thinks I am a citadel—

soundproof. A repository.

Because horsing around at bedtime he pierced

my cochlea with a pencil.

The first time I saw the inner ear

I thought it looked like a little life, thriving

but not yet big enough

for me to feel for it any kind of empathy.

By what were such things fed?

Would it overgrow its carapace

& make of the body a coppered bell?

And then I was sixteen & crossing

Saint Paul with my father. A seashell

in his pocket which for his own reasons

he refuses to wear. He can’t hear

the Chicano keeping pace behind us,

lean & loose-limbed,

clucking, “Gooks, gooks.”

For years, he’d sat a little further from us

each night at the dinner table

hollowed out by the roll of stock tickers

all through his graveyard hours.

It’s a remarkable machine

the nurse slides into my ear canal, built

to detect lies & arrhythmia & the trembling

of incalculable tranches of earth.

I pulled his pace toward mine but declined

to parse his solitude for him—planes

of salt-haloed stone refusing

to let footfalls cut to their holdings.