Chord Box: Poems

Aubade, Falsetto: 1978

Aubade, Falsetto: 1978 Thirteen, and nearly deaf in the left ear, very little wakes you.Your good side against the pillow mutes the early timbres. You don’t hear birds or your brother’s light feet as he leaves with Granddaddy and your father for the first spring hunt. Or their rifles, the crackling softened by distance. Two years before you would’ve begged to go, but now prefer sleep, its feverish meter through the morning. You aren’t awake to know 27 wisteria, the scent witching your nose like a girl’s tendrils.You are dreaming of Grace, your friend with the honey hair and her spoken alto, somehow lifted into descant. In her right hand, a wafting cigarette.The other fist full of feathers—barred, perhaps a hawk’s. She moves towards you, what you’ve longed for— a god where breath meets breath. Sleep: both ardor and refuge.When you stir you find last night’s phone, forgotten 28 in the crook of your shoulder. Where her voice was, a siren answers— clamoring, reed-like as you wake. 29 ...