Tympanic Membranes
by David Allen Sullivan
Every square foot of space—occupied,
unoccupied—is song, or a stilled melody
bracketing silence.
I tell myself not to dwell
on the ostentatious beauty of the buzzy colibrí
plundering the electric blue salvia spray,
but take in the pointer finger and thumb
pinch snagging a six-pack from ice,
the wing of a duct-taped side mirror
flapping
over a speed bump, the strew
of possessions arrayed around the filched
briefcase that now flutters the gully with
legal briefs and pie charts.
I try to listen:
tune in to a nearby wheel of gulls shrieking
a metallic music as they survey the dump,
and kids that pick through hubcaps and
bed springs—
one girl chi-chings! when
she finds metal that will become money,
and a boy peels up a poster to decorate
a plywood home—what someone deems
useless still makes music.
Our parents’
songs sing through us, ache of addictions/
benedictions/afflictions/connections: as
when my father dropped the receiver
to fall
into my mother’s arms and sob:
Pressman checked into a hotel, downed pills.
When those came back up he threw himself
through the plate glass window.
Never’d
seen him cry before, never knew it was in
him, never loved him so much. Jazz riffs
are left for us to improvise on. No end
is given.
Get out of the way, sounds say,
let us play through you, let the scruff
of your feet on the old woven doormat
that once read W E L C O M E,
brashly
scrape your ears until the music stings.
Former Santa Cruz county poet laureate David Allen Sullivan’s books include Strong-Armed Angels, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, a book of co-translation with Abbas Kadhim from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet, and Black Ice. He won the Mary Ballard Chapbook poetry prize for Take Wing. Black Butterflies over Baghdad was selected for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection by Tim Seibles, and published by Word Works, while Seed Shell Ash—a book of poems about his Fulbright year teaching in Xi’an, China—is forthcoming from Salmon Press. He teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Gulch Review with his students.
