Audiometry

      Because my son thinks I am a citadel—

      soundproof. A repository.

      Because horsing around at bedtime he pierced

      my cochlea with a pencil.

      The first time I saw the inner ear

      I thought it looked like a little life, thriving

      but not yet big enough

      for me to feel for it any kind of empathy.

      By what were such things fed?

      Would it overgrow its carapace

      & make of the body a coppered bell?

      And then I was sixteen & crossing

      Saint Paul with my father. A seashell

      in his pocket which for his own reasons

      he refuses to wear. He can’t hear

      the Chicano keeping pace behind us,

      lean & loose-limbed,

      clucking, “Gooks, gooks.”

      For years, he’d sat a little further from us

      each night at the dinner table

      hollowed out by the roll of stock tickers

      all through his graveyard hours.

      It’s a remarkable machine

      the nurse slides into my ear canal, built

      to detect lies & arrhythmia & the trembling

      of incalculable tranches of earth.

      I pulled his pace toward mine but declined

      to parse his solitude for him—planes

      of salt-haloed stone refusing

      to let footfalls cut to their holdings.