Ears of early fall field crickets.
Ears of straight-winged wind,
orthopteran,
a whistling bite
of a crazed-dog wind,
of a spitting tea kettle wind.
*
Wind bends
into wind,
polytimbral,
auscultating
in the key of all ears.
Wingseeds
of words
disseminate
in an eddy
of bird chatter,
in a wind-white
sine wave.
Helix,
antihelix,
tragus,
concha,
the auricle
is a refrain-
funnel,
the wind
a stray-sound
dispersal vector.
*
Labyrinthine.
The ear’s outer helix.
A snailing earworm creep.
A song without end.
A chirp, a whistle, a bell.
The gate of hell in your ear…
*
15 kilohertz,
bright vocal,
breath sound.
10 kilohertz,
sparrow tracks
in the tympanic cavity.
Wind through dead grass.
A vestibular swish.
*
The ears’ geologic fault lines
are wavelengths the distance
of a house sparrow’s wingspan,
the circumference of a saffron
parasol cap (an amplitude
of a forest’s-worth of spores),
the sawtooth wave
of the amplified sandpaper scrape
of a grasshopper’s tympanal plate.
*
Near verbless intonation.
Sunlight. Upslope wind.
Leafcutter bee.
Pollinators in a cave
of stridulating ossicles.
Cross-fertilized sound.
Hover fly. Bee fly.
Great spangled fritillary’s assault
on the auditory cortex—
“An almost continuous humming.”
Ruby-throated hummingbird’s
figure-eight rotation
is “the sustained E
of the four-line octave.”
*
The ears’ orchestration
has a cricket lineage
of 300 million years,
the mandibular click
of Triassic wasps,
the brushing rustle
of Mesozoic cycads,
the arboreal breeze of late
Cretaceous horsetails.
*
Sun discharges waxy light
—entropy-tempered glare—
over the city’s annoyance forest,
elm trees’ scratchy chorus,
ear-comb twigs, for every leaf
a bird’s persistent singing.
*
“On ear and ear two noises too old to end…”
A repeating beeline cloud song…
A furnace’s year-round cycling…
An entire wetland,
an entire woodwind section,
constant wind,
at the wrong speed,
at the wrong angle.
*
Auditory paleontology
is a fossil-Lagerstätte
tree of sound.
Ear fossils in veins
of paper-thin shale,
veins of insects and leaves,
flowers and birds.
The bony fossil record
is hammer and anvil.
An uncoiled
cochlear subfossil.
*
The outer ear is a fruiting body,
the ear cave’s antechamber,
an irksome cavalier mushroom,
a huddled milkcap,
a fleshy goldfinch perch.
*
Small nouns of sound:
bee, bug, bird. An ear
on either side of a cloud,
altocumulus,
contraltocumulus.
The sun behind a façade
of exaggeratedly high
falsetto clouds mimics
a cricket’s pitch.
The earsick sweet spot
—a grotesque flame,
a flickering nerve—
is 3.5 kilohertz,
a cricket’s tessitura.
*
Din under a cockcrow sky.
Epithets of sleeplessness:
Rosy conk, redbelt,
garnet-gilled milkcap.
A mushrooming chorus
is fire bonnet and orange-gill,
an earhorn daybreak,
a spore-bearing lower horizon.
Midday the neck’s
bright-sun twinge,
a jaw-tethering sky.
A swallow’s wing
—a hand—
shading the eyes.
*
Wood ear, jelly ear
(Auricularia americana),
a wrinkled music,
a music of decaying conifer wood,
a floor of sinking sand,
the walls’ subsurface squelch.
*
The imagination’s
high fog clouds
are the end of the ear-line.
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage!”
Fast-moving cloud gaps,
the ground obscured,
free-falling disoriented.
*
The middle ear can sing 64 distinct notes in eight seconds
like a wren.
*
1.5 to 8 kilohertz.
A house wren’s harsh rattle,
a scold call,
an exuberant chip,
a chit call’s rise,
its sustained fall
against the innermost ear’s wall.
Of the genus Troglodytes,
the wren, shelter-seeker,
small cavity nester,
prey only to instinct.
The bird as unwitting
as the ear.
*
When pollinators enter the ear
the eustachian tube is redefined.
As an aural floral map.
As a slow oboeing passage.
Throat-back inflamed
in soft-palate petunia,
call it beardtongue,
call it bellflower’s
cricketing tune
rapunzeling
down the corolla channel.
*
The ears’ amphitheatre wears a sheen
of cerumen, bitter air, the sky
a pigment between Saturn and Mars,
a nuance of moon,
unearthly noise.
*
The middle ear transmits vibrations
through tubular flowers.
Bluebells, coral bells,
fuchsia in cylindrical G-major.
60+ decibels of hummingbirds
flit a patchwork of yellow and red.
Orange for caution.
A polychromatic ocean.
A wind entrapped in the ear
since the Renaissance.
Ear-lobed leaves,
robe of garnet leaf,
the bells ring,
alas, alas…
NOTE. This work came out of my acquiring what is now referred to as Covid-onset tinnitus, and trying to figure out a way to write in the midst of it. These excerpts are from a long poem that imagines an ecosystem of birds, insects, and plants within the ears.
