The air hoards voices—and so many
sounds: distant sirens, the neighbor’s children
chattering along with starlings and chickadees.
Old men outside bodegas, gawking, gossiping.
Underneath these, the paper-like crumpling
of dry leaves, as though the air was writing
everything down, compulsively taking notes—
what did he say? Something about voices,
something about birds.
The air ought to ripple when we speak
the way a pond does when it rains.
Water becomes saw-toothed, jagged,
just so the air is sharpened by a human voice.
To think, there are deserts of silence—
like the moon, that fishhook dangling from a tree.
There, in craters that never once ricocheted echoes
off their stones, we would die. We couldn’t bear it.
There can be no more inhuman place.
Imagine yourself without a voice,
unable to say one word, unable to lean over
to someone you love and whisper in her ear.
Not here. Here, we are always talking—
almost too much—until the sky seems like a jar
of voices knocked over on the floor.
I’m on my hands and knees, trying to sort them,
trying to trace one back to you.
But why this noise?
Why do we feel incomplete until someone hears us?
Because part of each of us remains children,
and cannot live if we go unnoticed?
That is our first act: the cry,
the only thing we can do
to call the ones who know us:
Come from the other room!
Then who are we crying out for when we sing?
Here I am—this voice
is mine, no one else can use it.
Yours sounds sure, confident.
Our conversation continues—
our only fear the thought we might be stifled
and our voices left wilting
like cut flowers in the vase of our mouths.
