Tinnitus
Identifying it at last as both a persistent high-A ringing in my left ear
and also a phantom sound that the brain—or maybe mind—makes
in its insistence to be heard like a thread woven through setting
and cloud-cover tapestries of the everyday subtly flashing only as points
of light, platinum or gold (as if from a singular lighthouse on some abandoned
coast, eastern perhaps, important—no, necessary—in its day, giving
both reference to destination and illumination of rocky hazards jutting
up out of the otherwise smooth onyx covering the night sea-skin is,
so that they—the early-morning crowds gathered thick as piranhas at pier’s end
—could get their next installments of Boz’s addictive invented realities
straight from the holds of the tall-masted ships that had trekked like gentle giants
over the whale-road—their white scarves billowing in the breeze of the bay,
at last, as the one high-turning light choreographed the last sweep of their
long arrival and settled them), I sensed it as core or something of core matter,
that, if grasp-able, could inform us, illumine the dangerous darkening bay that
is ours, everyone’s, here: waiting, as for a poem or an apology that may begin,
depend from that x-axis of rotating light or steady high contrapuntal tone.
—David Tipton
Rejection: A Small Ars Poetica, Sort Of
“Though the manuscript you sent has not found a place with us…
--The Editors”
Well, here’s another one. And like the others before it (are they folding-out
siblings or mere carbon copies?), it’s dressed in nice finery, with shadowy chain-
lines running throughout—just like the ones in our elegant stationary or in elderly
tomes, so believable.—And how we believed it, believe me, and so rightly feared,
shaking inside our booths before its austerity and the well structured speeches
it always pulled out of its inside vest pocket and read out like a sentence
artfully spooled in a single paragraph working smoothly as plumbing, which
left us so weakened, like those lead dreams of our youth. But we’re so far
past it now, taking it as no more than a commercial thing—like those worn PSAs
that accuse us and warn us—and so address it by leaving chocolate cookies on
the coffee table for whenever it may next arrive: snacks we dispense as glib
tokens. But recently, there’s this interesting spin-off: A maddening drive
to write a history of things as they are—something I do in closed quarters,
pretending the mercury-vapor light is a kerosene lamp whose smoky chimney
sends out a burnt oily smell.—I think that’s why the tight lines keep breaking in
odd places before reaching the right margin, depicting you as a fair damsel
chained by love inside an ogre’s keepsake box; and me a sad crowbar
bent in night light in the effort and hope of actually prying you out.
—David Tipton