A new "department." A gray hive
of furniture, public paper-clips, warm
copiers and elevator shafts, paths beaten
into the linoleum by strangers
who forget they are strangers
to some. I haven't even arrived
but I can hear its hum. Its pulse
feels like my pulse, removed, alive
in layers of tissue paper, rustling deep inside
an echo. I used to think an echo
was humiliatingmade a sound
a stranger to itself. But how small, how
reversed. An echo takes a voice
and throws the world
behind it, into its limited sense
of selfshows us how we'll sound
in the long run.
Locally, it's easy to feel
centralcenteredinside
a muffled, untested somewhere.
The old department, for example,
kept me close, within ear's reach
of its offices for a while.
It sent transmissions daily to my "inbox,"
left thin, un-creased sheets
of paper in a cubby of swirled wood
my hand was sure to find
and enter. And belonging was never an item
up for discussionhow
embarrassing, like income to a banker
at dinner-time, like thought
to a thinking brain. But perhaps
we should have mentioned it, just
once (for safe-keeping).
When you are alone you can see
the bright echoes of things
shuddering outward, pressing
their cold relevance
through and past you, then past
any reason for the sound
to have flown from its source
in the first place. But is this true
sight? Is this wavy gray grief
the bare screen that hosts all
life's hullabaloo, muting everything
(eventually) into its static
inward gaze? Or have I missed
the point. Am I missing
outside the lighthoused point
of life. Is the screen
mere formal blank that lends
the royal middle ground
some good contrast, a resting place
before what really counts
reels, projects, radiates, draws us
close to the volcano
of original sound, makes us
feel things again?
Or maybe department is a true measure
only of where we've been. And
(if we're lucky) how many blistering rungs
of echo we'll have to grip
before the climb softens horizontally
to a tide of local ripples,
magnetized and warm and given
to small murmurings that make sense
of those who have found the shore
and hear its sounds
as the slowly un-stunning pulse
of their singular lives.
Jessica Garratt
Southwest Review
Volume 98, Number 1