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