Читать книгу Selfi americano - Curtis Bauer - Страница 25

No matter how hard I listen, I can’t hear my wife’s

voice. She lost it outside of town—west of there,

where trains stack up their great barreling chests

and smoke, and the wind whips grass and dust

scatters and fades into some older incarnation.

Once a Polish man told me about his rooms in exile

in a far corner of this country, their proximity

to the noisiest people in the world. Each night

when he sat to his solitary dinner and his books,

the noise of the earth would gather outside

the opposite wall he shared, guiltily. Even the fork

clink scraping across his plate left him. And his

breathing. Once he put his fingers in his ears

as if he were a child swimming inside a summer

pool alone with gaping fish and the song of his hands

through water, the dense thrum of pressure clinging

to him. Even the memory of his stretching chest

left him. He became heartless.

And that was enough

to learn how to stand outside the clamor and bustle

on the other side of a wall. I’ve never owned a sound.

I speak a name and the name is gone. Amnesia

might take this form—the soft tone of some man

seducing a woman is a murmur, a dog barking

to be let out or in only clamor, only noise gathering

and clinging to the walls on the other side. The world

keeps from some even the words on the page,

mute. When some rooms are demolished

their walls must finally give back a bit of beating

sound. Say one of those neighbors stopped

near there with his new wife, called up the child

he once was to show her how far his arm could throw

a rock, hit a sign or maybe the passing train. The train

may have blown its horn and the silence leached out

of the stone ping. The silence was then great between

the horn and his woman, and he needed to throw it away.

The stone hit the train, bounded back and she began

to speak. The train was quiet and stopped in the middle

of this vast flat, engines idling down to thin humming.

And from some shoulder stones in the road, bordered

by lanky grasses and loam that silence sifts up to a passing

car, through the seat, through the conversation suddenly

paused. No one will be satisfied with how this ends.

Because stories have an ending here; inside space

even a conversation can lose its way. A couple can fall

asleep angry, both certain the other stopped speaking first.

Neither consider the stone. And the stone sits untouched

in a cage of stars, a cage the night presses down

over the grass, and the voice of everything passing

by is swallowed up, until it isn’t.