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.

 
Ted Mathys

Ted Mathys is the author of two books of poetry, The Spoils and Forge, both from Coffee House Press. Originally from Ohio, he lives in St. Louis.

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