Empire

The Loudspeaker

51 The Loudspeaker In the Ogaden desert, they skim it from muddy water, pour it over cactus meat, ululations crisp as morning birds. T With fossils they tune innards. With tails write. Pause for good light. Let it pass through remains, the Loudspeaker warbling in low tones. T In Oaxaca, they carve it of radishes. Contorted shapes shaved into violins slung into trees, cutting a thick, rained foliage sonata for African bees. Some measures drizzling the branches, others hidden in the roots, T the pulse endlessly trilling in the City of Angels, where it resurfaces by the docks: fifty varieties of night shade and sweet pearl, fifty sacks of thistle grown entirely by pitch. 52 T As the what if of the inflamed song splits the surface like a whale’s tail, Argentines collected sun-bleached cardboard in the storm of smells, knowing hours by the heat of another’s body. T Will we hear it en masse, the solipsistic question: why do they hate us? flaking to an inarticulate texture, dusty rafters quaking until undone, hornlike, piece by piece we enter the Loudspeaker addressed as stranger: T You are the last stranger, little organ, little ear, all your lorries loaded with air. Here we are the spoils: this breath a wilderness, broken date, all wound, a wilderness of books becoming wind. 53 Here we turn like snake tails or great bridal veils toward the untoward self, reaching for our own pushing away as in your voice (long dead) will reach the shores of others through calculus, cartoons, used shoes pausing beneath public poplars, their golden fans applauding: Mamá,Mamá,Mama,Mama,Mamá kissing you, caressing a rhythm. ...