I just have two more poems.
Thank you again for listening and being here tonight.
Antenna.
Tuning not lute but car radio, Cocteau's Orpheus
copies the broadcasts from a nether world for verses.
His muse a circuitry my grandmother
inspected nights at Motorola.
Before her shift, she put me to bed, laid down beside me
and smoked Parliaments--
each drag like tower light to planes overhead.
From crest to crest is wavelength and frequency
the number per second.
Where the waves won't reach, we call shadow,
count the radio's components like prosody--
diodes, triodes, tetrodes-- and dial the frequency in meters.
Jack Spicer cited quasars, quasi stellar radio, traveling light
years, as possible sources.
I remember Orion-- one slick Matador, Tío called him--
up on South Mountain, leaning on towers, red-eyed
with warning, and somehow, by frequency, by transmissions
I vaguely knew, drunk with music.
With ham operator, Pauline Oliveros
sent a Hello to the moon's tympanum.
It bounced back, dropped in pitch by a Doppler effect,
and she accompanied the sound on accordion.
A nana is lullaby, cradle song, I tell my mom, a nana now,
and we talk about how neither of us had heard that before.
Canción de cuna, the lacuna we hum and tune by,
its tonic note a chord knot we worry and teethe
on with night song.
One grandmother with Vicks, one with Tiger Balm,
rubbed fires of camphor and mint,
old poultices into my chest, their palms kneading and wet
with salve, its menthols, to strip the chaff
and rattle in a night wheeze.
Can you hear their lullabies?
One like the dicho, chiquito pero picoso,
one in all five tones of village dialect.
With whish hum for thresholds, they
put to bed each name for the night.
In Cocteau's version, Orpheus crosses over
through a tailor's mirror.
The carnival house optics of Marx's commodity fetish,
I thought, or my father in Phoenix,
stocking the reach-in with Old Milwaukee
and seeing in the glass, a brief moment, his own reflection.
Ai Gu tells me my great grandfather frequented Chinatown
fortune tellers, ones with charts and calendars,
a crystal ball almanac for a paper son on a paper path,
a celestial divination in the back room of butcher
or herbal shop or corner store like ours,
where the till bell drifted back to Ng Ng,
her wok kicking sparks off stove flame,
or find me at my desk my father fashioned from Schlitz 12
packs for weekend's homework, me copying out my name,
a dotted line running through its center
and not knowing the silences, not
knowing then the cost of turning back to see.
In today's news, US troops install the miles
of border razor wire, so-called concertina for the coil that
extends and flattens like the bellows of a squeeze box.
Listen to everything all the time,
and remind yourself when you are not listening,
instructed Oliveros, a composer of sonospherics and a chi kung
student of quantum physics.
In practicing, she explained, I have
experienced listening with the palms of my hand.