Amplitude

for Bruce Bond

I tune my son’s guitar to open Dand let him strum one major chord, his nosepressed against the porch’s snow-flecked paneso he can belt his morning song at wrens

who find we’re out of seed again. Spin spinmy decision machine is how his chorusgoes, a child’s exercise in consonancethat drones his nickel strings ringing flat.

Pom-Pom was the tribal nickname forthe Maxim gun and its one-pound shell,my book explains, which the British leveledagainst South Africa in the Second

Boer War. I cringe and try to skipthe glossy panoramic gray of gauntarmies rotting on the savannah—one boysmall as mine whose open eyes seem to stare

at vultures circling above him thoughI know it is an accident of space.The Scottish baron Sir Mackinnon saidthe Maxim would prove to be a great

peace-preserver. Our local weathermanforecasts slush all day, good snowball stuff,back and forth from snow to freezing rainthrough midnight. When my son drops his pick

inside the belly of his Schoenhut,one-third the size of my own acoustic,he crouches on his knees and shakes itupside down so gravity can work

its law, which rattles like the bulleta surgeon’s forceps drop inside a panso he can show the nurses, whose reliefunties the knotted ribbons of their masks.