The Sound Weapon
Ahead of the vegetable cart a horse drops
a hoof on paving stones, the clop equivalent
to a gunshot and a hooker
in Prospect Heights in the guise
of a Civil War widow has a heart attack.
Today in the early modern Brooklyn
that never was, your shirt is
loud against the façade
of the cinema the sandhogs
hit after shifts in the water tunnels
under Washington Avenue and the forsythia’s
exuberant yellow is incommensurate
with its quiet formal abstraction.
Infrasound and ultrasound are not yet ready
to detect your daughter, bleed your eardrums,
or cause you to witness the ghost of Whitman
by vibrating your eyeballs from five hundred feet,
but one day in Cairo you will find
the din of our conversation has achieved
the decibel level of a jackhammer
while a delivery boy on a bicycle
raps a crescent wrench against a propane tank
lashed to his basket as he pedals
to warn the city of his continual arrival.
A stentorian senator taps the mic
to declare all sound potential weaponry
and the alderman’s Rottweiler
whose vocal cords have been removed
for the sake of the neighbors’
coffee and clementines
barks in a furious silence.
