"Sound Machine."
When the manchild says, "you're not listening,"
I am not listening.
Another time, when the manchild says, "you're not listening,"
I am.
But it isn't the right kind of listening.
It isn't a listening that feels to the manchild
like I am listening.
He does not, as the saying goes, "feel heard."
When I ask the manchild to stop doing X, he does it again,
some kind of clicking, or ripping, or fidgeting,
a certain kind of language, or patting
the head of baby manchild, or one of the many things baby
manchild does not like the manchild
to do that the manchild does over and over and over.
Stop, I say.
The manchild does it again.
The way he looks at me when he does X again
is called not listening.
It is also how I know he heard me.
Writing is a way of paying attention, I tell the students.
They continue doing X, which in this case,
is looking down at their notebooks, which in this case,
tells me nothing about whether or not they're listening.
Sometimes, when the manchild speaks, I listen my brains out.
I listen with my whole heart.
But it is not enough.
I am the wire monkey mother with a bottle
when he needs something soft and cloth-covered.
"You're not listening," says the manchild again,
sometimes just like that in lowercase, but more often
with cursing and door-slamming.
Sometimes, I listen as if my life depends upon it.
But all I hear is the silence after the door slamming,
which is the sound of the manchild not feeling heard.
Actually, it is not silence.
It is a muffled tumult in the other room.
It is the sound of not wanting to go after him.
It is the sound of my body crossing the room,
my hand on the doorknob.
Sometimes, it is I who slam the door,
and then lie in bed listening to the sound of my own breathing,
and then my crying.
When the husband says, "It's hard to teach him not
to slam the door when you slam the door," I think, how true.
And I listen to the sound of myself
not slapping him across the face.
That is the sound of my own breathing
and the sound of the stare between us.
"Do you have any questions?"
I ask the students.
"How are your dream journals going?
How about the automatic writing?
Well," I say, "I guess, this is the part of class
when I ask questions and no one responds."
"OK," I say, "then we're all in agreement.
All righty," I say.
"I can't believe I just said all righty," I say.
Can you hear the sound of the white plate breaking
in the sink?
Can you hear the sound of my widened eyes or the text
I send to my friend saying, "I have just become a person who
breaks plates in the sink"?
Sometimes, when the manchild speaks,
I am listening to the sound of wanting to be elsewhere
and the sound of myself thinking, stay, listen,
which sounds like the sound of the sound machine
over the husband snoring, or, perhaps, the sound of snoring
over the sound machine, which is to say two sounds at once,
which is to say, hard to make sense of,
which is to say effortful, which is
to say a kind of listening that is unsatisfying
to the manchild.
Perhaps, he wants my listening to look effortless,
which looks to him like love.
Or perhaps, he wants more effort.
On the subway, two women scream at each other.
One says, "There's no more room, take the next train."
The other says, "You're taking up
more than one space," and presses into the crowded car.
Everyone is listening intently to something on his headphones,
or has her eyes closed, or pretends
to be completely unaware of the two women, inches
apart, screaming.
"Stop screaming!"
I scream above their screaming when I can no longer stand it.
"Don't talk to each other that way,"
I scream, my voice barely audible over there cursing.
No one meets my eye.
"Trash!"
one yells.
"Get the fuck out of my face," the other yells.
"Stop shouting!"
I shout.
No one hears me.
The poem is what I listen to when listening to the city
is too much.
The poem is a way of not paying attention, of paying attention
to the poem instead of.
The poem is a sound machine.
"Uh-huh," I say to baby manchild as I walk him to school.
He is either talking about Ellen DeGeneres
or professional soccer.
I am not listening.
"Sure," I say, "OK," I say, "Uh-huh."
I am not listening.
I am still not listening.
Actually, I am listening.
I am just not listening to him.
On the Listserv, which is everywhere and always,
I am accused of conflation.
I am asked to be quiet, to listen.
I am asked to read the offered links more carefully
and to think about my behavior and the way in which asking
the questions I've asked has caused people of color
to perform labor on my behalf, such as having to explain
racism to me, which is exhausting for them
and a white violence on my part.
I am asked not to conflate race and gender.
I am asked not to conflate the confessional
with appropriation.
I am asked not to conflate the personal with the conceptual.
I am asked to understand that I will never understand,
can never understand what it is like to be other than who
and what I am.
I am asked to examine my privilege,
but quietly, and maybe, think about why white people feel
the need to take up all the space,
why white people like me talk so much, use so many words.
I am asked to listen more and talk less.
I am asked to consider intersectionality.
"You're not listening," says the manchild
when he finds me reading and rereading the links.
On the subway, some manchildren are jostling, and joking,
and using language I don't want baby manchild to hear.
I am trying to read to him but he isn't listening.
He is listening to the manchildren,
to the sound of his future.
No, not his future, for he will likely never
speak like these manchildren.
He is listening to the sound of his whiteness,
which maybe, for once, is the sound of listening.
I want to ask the Listserv about the difference
between conflation and intersectionality.
But I do not know how to ask this question
while being quiet, which I have been asked to be.
I do not know how to listen more visibly, especially
on a Listserv where no one can see me reading and rereading
the links, and being quiet, and sitting as still as possible,
even ignoring my children and waiting
for someone to post something new for me to listen to.
Somewhere on the Listserv, a door slamming.
More than once, I reread the links.
The links tell me I am suffering from white fragility.
The links say I should listen.
"Can you hear me?"
my friend asks while reading a new poem
while I sit on the steps of a brownstone
and shield the microphone from the sounds of the city.
"Yes," I say, "I can hear you."
"I lost you in the elevator," I say
to another friend whose mother is just home from the hospital
and lives two blocks away from me, and is very private,
and no, there's nothing I can do.
When I ask if there is anything I can do for my friend who
lives far from me and far from her mother
just home from the hospital, my friend says, "Yeah, shoot me."
I call a third friend and read her this poem.
She says, "Take out the parts about the Listserv.
Only the people on the Listserv will understand those parts."
"Don't you know," I joke, "that this poem is only for you?
No one will care about any parts."
"Also," she says, "people might think that manchild and baby
manchild are the same person unless you mention them
both at the very beginning.
And," she says, "it's too long."
I make it longer.
"I'm leaving," the husband texts.
In this context, it means he's coming home.
"I'm going to bed," I respond, which in a way,
means I'm leaving.
The poem is a sound machine.
Whatever the family says, they say over the sound
of the sound machine.
When baby manchild mentions Ellen DeGeneres
or professional soccer as we walk to school, I am relieved.
Because this means I can think about other things
and let his barely audible voice bleed
into the city's ever-encroaching surround sound.
And in this way, I am listening, but this time,
to my own thoughts.
Surely, I am allowed from time to time such a luxury,
am I not?
My thoughts, I'm thinking, are associational and interrupted
just like my writing.
And I am probably thinking about my writing
and about how a novelist friend once
told me the secret was not to allow children
to steal your muse time.
She thought about her novels while watching her kids
in the sandbox, while giving them baths,
while putting them to sleep.
"Don't waste time wondering whether you
have Cheerios in the pantry," she said to me years ago.
The relaying of this writerly advice to you
is the length of time in real time
it takes for baby manchild to yank my arm.
His narrowed eyes and the line of his mouth accuse me.
Goodbye, I write to the Listserv.
It turns out, I am not so good at listening.
And I am tired of being wrong.
I sit and listen to the virtual wall
between their posts and me.
I have turned off the Listserv, which is everywhere and always,
but all the other sound machines are whirring and whirring.
The city is nothing if not conflation.
And believe me, this city is not nothing.
When I read to baby manchild, I listen to myself
reading to baby manchild.
Usually it sounds like childhood.
It sounds like the sound of a child listening to his mother
reading.
But actually, it is the sound of two people listening
to a woman who long ago was writing to someone or no one.
How was she to know?
The book requires explanation.
So we stop listening to the mother, me,
reading and listen to the mother, me,
explaining, such as rape, also racism, Hitler,
violence against children, and what Atticus means
when he says, "There's nothing more sickening to me
than a low grade white man who'll take advantage
of a Negro's ignorance.
Don't fool yourself, it's all adding up.
And one of these days, we're going to pay the bill for it."
Perhaps, all I am is conflation.
What then?
I would like to ask.
But I can't ask the Listserv, because I've signed off.
When I finish explaining everything
in the world to baby manchild, and have sat, and held his hand
until he's fallen asleep--
because it's hard to fall asleep when one's mother has just
explained the worst of everything--
I tiptoe from the room, knowing that all this time
that I have not been listening to the manchild who
has been waiting for me to come and listen,
waiting to tell me that I am not listening,
which is sometimes all he has to say.
Perhaps, thinking is the sound machine.
The city is full of them.
When the husband and I speak to each other,
we hear things that the other did not say.
This may be because we are not listening,
or, perhaps, we are listening too much, or listening wrongly.
We break each other like plates in the sink.
Other times, the breaking is like forgetting to water
a plant for months at a time.
"What?"
he says when I have said nothing.
"What?"
"I didn't say anything," I say.
Perhaps, my face is the face of a person who is
listening or trying to listen.
Perhaps, this is the problem.
Everything we say sounds like disappointment.
And our silence is over full of sorrow.
"I'm sorry," I say when a woman bumps me on the subway.
She looks at me with a diamond hard rage.
"So," I say to the class, "can anyone
tell me what are some effects of addressing something or someone
inanimate or absent in a poem?
It's called apostrophe," I say.
The poet brings the unreal closer into the real.
But the poem itself becomes a fictive space.
During quiet writing, I put them in this poem
where they respond as readily as they do in real life.
"Goodness," my friend says when an emergency vehicle
passes by while I'm sitting on the steps of a brownstone
while she's reading me her new long poem over the phone.
"It's too long," the other friend
says when I read her this poem when she's in a hotel,
alone in Philly, when the poem is half as long as it is now.
"Don't go," someone back channels "good luck,"
another back channels.
"We'll miss your voice."
My voice is all over the city.
Sometimes, at night, I beg the husband to just be quiet.
I want his weight.
"Tell me," he asks, "just tell me what you want."
What I want is no talking.
I am conflating again.
Husband, manchild, baby manchild, gender, sex,
the personal, Listserv.
In the crowded car, I try to step carefully
around a stroller so more people can enter the train.
"Stay there," I say to baby manchild, "hold the pole."
No one helps him.
A woman with a stroller glares at me.
I suspect that sometimes when the manchild says
I am not listening, he is not saying what he wants to say.
He says and says and says, and of course, I am not listening.
Because he wants me to hear something else, something
he is not saying.
The thing he is not saying is underneath the thing
he is saying.
And sometimes, I think I know what this might be.
But other times I think, there is no other thing.
This is just a way of excusing myself
for being a poor listener.
Either way, the sound of my own thinking
takes up too much space in this family.
"Stop," I say to manchild.
He keeps going.
Isn't that what I want?
Isn't that the way he keeps going a sign of his resilience
and of my maternal success?
"You're not listening," says the manchild.
"Stop talking," says the manchild.
"Stop talking," the world says to me.
"Stop talking," says the part of me
who imagines the world is telling me to stop talking.