Tongue Lyre

The Sirens

34 The Sirens Pilot whales beach their black bodies on sandbars off the Cape. With my grandparents, I watched the dying on TV in August, when tourist children poured more sun onto the whale fins with neon play-buckets of warm water, tried to push them out, push them out past the stripes of gleaming snails but the whales kept coming in again at high tide, and when water bled away from their heavy forms they cried soft dog noises that humans also make from a place in the ribs that opens a chamber, a cathedral, where an echo echoes and loses itself. Ear training involves singing, knowing how to sing a series of pitches in your mind before your mouth finds strange leaps in sound with the tongue and throat, not a melody, these facts to learn. Stuff your ears with wax, fall asleep on the deck of a motorboat near the jagged granite rocks people arrange into jetties to guide the land. Guidance, what, people say, some women need and they had it coming. I remember braiding the hair of a friend’s doll by myself in her bedroom, 35 and the sheer curtains whipped rain against the walls and then the tornado sirens howled, first one, then another, suburban wolves, as all the nearby towns called and called to one another. The babysitter downstairs told me I heard nothing and flipped the radio on, piled flashlights near her sandals, so my friend and I checked the basement but yellow clumps of sewage had backed up to the bottom step, strewn flowers of toilet paper to clog the wheels of the pool table, so upstairs we made sure the cathedral windows opened to trees, close to the house, so dark, and we sat listening, knowing from school that when the storm comes, you have to let the wind in. ...