Aria for This Listening Area

Donald Platt

Turn the dial,
voices spill
           like mercury,
fill and brim
             the empty ear's
semi-circular
             cisterns: scattered
showers, the best
                 in used cars,
grand opera, pop,
                  and punk rock,
talk shows
           on UFO's,
crank calls,
            "Unless you die
and are born again
                  you shall not enter
my kingdom,"
               Local Wheat-Growers
Mutual Hail
            and Life Insurance,
low premiums,
               another love song,
aluminum siding
                 all scrambled in
one listening area.

                  What poetry!
This radio
           whose dial you spin
until you find
              a frequency
on which the soul
                   : 29
                  sings a cappella
or plays calypso
                with wooden mallets
on marimbas
             and steel drums.
Are poets only
               deadbeat DJ's
doing time
           on the night shift,
those virtuosos
               of ventriloquism,
their programs mostly
                      pre-recorded?
Impromptu talkers
                   stalk
the wavelengths
                for invisible
listeners.
         What aria
for an area
           with insomnia?

I love any
           area
that "'listens."'
              How many
pairs of ears
             per square mile
in North Dakota?
                  Who else tunes
into this station
                and hears
Heartbreak Hotel
                 go out
to Mary Lee
             from Stormin' Norman
at 4 A.M.?

           Language, not

            is where we live.
Tennessee's
            a way of talking.
I listen for
           the idioms
that mean I'm home,
                     a neighbor
saying "He's not
                 wrapped tight,"
or "She's
          a couple
of sandwiches
              short of a picnic,"
or "You're whining
                   like a dog
shitting
        persimmon seeds."

Can we map
             a dialect
the way we can
                the Appalachians,
this landslide
             of syllables
which never ends,
                  or is speech more
a river that loves
                 switching beds
in a flash flood?

                In my split-
level duplex,
             the man who lives
above me keeps
                his blinds down
and TV tuned
              to game shows,
soaps, reruns 41
             of Guiding Light,
                      the evening news
"Mass murderer loose
                     in Arkansas
 celebrates Christmas,
                      kills his wife
 and seven children,"
                     then sitcoms, Wheel
 of Fortune, weather,
                     whatever plays
 the air waves
               at five hundred-sixty
 megacycles
             near the end
 of our broadcast day.
                      Because my neighbor's
 hard of hearing
                 and his floor is my ceiling,
 what seeps down,
                   in the small hours
 when I can not sleep,
                      is the restless world's
 raw nerves,
             an insomniac's static,
 the monotone
                of loneliness.