i.
My ear is filled with ocean for a year.
The specialists can’t diagnose the deep
I’m swimming in, how everything’s unclear
like water muddied by the wind. I sleep
beneath a weight of quilts, and then I wake
convinced I’m drowning in the undertow.
My symptoms shift from week to week: an ache
inside my head, aphasia, even though
just yesterday I was articulate,
words fast as gleaming marlins on my tongue.
The ground is solid. No, it’s soaking wet.
Confusion rises like a tide. I’m flung
beneath the waves, a swiveling terrain,
a sound like swishing liquid in the brain.
ii.
A sound like swishing liquid in the brain
is finally silenced by a louder sound
inside the pearly cave—I entertain
myself by counting every clang around
my head, each click, each sharp, metallic cry
an underwater creature calling out.
It feels like hours in the MRI,
placed in its luminescent gaze. No doubt
it’s only minutes that I’m lying there.
And when it’s done, the scan shows nothing strange,
no injury, no damage to repair.
My brain, all ocean trench and mountain range,
is adequate. But still, I miss what’s near,
and all the distant noises disappear.
iii.
And all the distant noises disappear,
held in the coiling cochlea perhaps,
the shell that spirals deep within my ear.
The doctor plays a set of tones. He taps
a tuning fork and lets it vibrate in
the room, a tremoring that’s like the air
before a storm, before the gusts begin
and cresting waves blow everywhere.
I answer yes or no. I nod my head.
Already I am far away: I curl
as though a mollusk in a briny bed,
a conch, an oyster pressed around a pearl.
Concealed this way, I can ignore the rain,
the hale, the thunder at the windowpane.
iv.
The hale, the thunder at the windowpane
are warnings of catastrophe to come.
The news predicts another hurricane,
a record-breaking cold that’s worrisome,
a flood, a forest fire that leaps beyond
the riverbank, a summer heat that dries
the grass, the algae blooming in the pond,
and even clouds that vanish from the skies.
Of course, the world’s unsteady on its feet.
There’s never good news anymore.
A stream of bad has overflowed the street
and fills the yard and rises to the door.
And now the walls begin to soften, bend.
The house is churning water. Floors distend.
v.
The House is churning water, floors distend
or seem to swell with all that rage. The crowd
is like a force I scarcely comprehend,
the growing shadow of a thundercloud.
Their bodies topple over barricades.
They shove against the Senate doors. They press
their faces to the glass. Whoever wades
into their eddying is drowned. I guess
this is democracy—a thing to breach,
to wreck the way the sea might decimate
a row of cabins built along the beach.
All afternoon I watch them inundate
the Capitol. They rumble ceaselessly.
The walls are waves about to crash on me.
vi.
The walls are waves about to crash on me.
Each night I write another line to prop
my house upright. My pen moves restlessly
across the page as if these words could stop
the slow dissolve of everything: my mind,
my body quavering along the brink.
Even the nation state is misaligned,
a building in collapse. Sometimes I think
how slight a poem is. It cannot stand
against the rain, the ink a blur of blue,
the paper mush and crumpled in the hand.
It’s so impermanent. There’s little I can do.
My sonnet won’t survive—and why pretend?—
this soggy vertigo that has no end.
vii.
This soggy vertigo that has no end—
that’s what my father calls the long disease
he’s suffered thirty years. I cannot apprehend
how he endures the electronic breeze
inside his ears, tinnitus like a hiss,
a ringing, yes, but also like the thrum
of waves recoiling from the shore. I miss
my silences. It’s possible to numb
oneself, he says, against the feeble screech.
I can’t imagine decades of this din
that shrieks in me, all music drowned, all speech
obscured beneath a wash of sound akin
to river currents swirling restlessly,
a dizzy tide that tugs me out to sea.
viii.
A dizzy tide that tugs me out to sea
has made my chart unreadable. I’ve lost
my north, no longer guided by astronomy
or landmarks up ahead, and I am tossed
from darkness into day and back to dark.
My map is torn. My compass spins as if
it too has vertigo. I hardly mark
where I have been before my shaky skiff
begins to roll again, the oars unpinned,
and I am pitched. I tumble overboard.
I grab a piece of wreckage, let the wind
propel me where it wants to go, toward
a rock, its lone inhabitant a bird.
My thoughts are fog. I stumble through each word.
ix.
My thoughts are fog. I stumble through each word,
the classroom like a world of mist, the light
gone dim, what lies ahead of me now blurred
like chalk-dust in the air. Today I write
the names of sonnets on the board, expound
upon the steady footsteps of the line.
A journeying, I say, of sense and sound.
And in the space between lines eight and nine,
there is the volta—swift, light-headed swerve—
but even this rotation is controlled,
a calculated turn, a measured curve.
Then all at once my vertigo takes hold:
I lose my balance in the argument,
adrift inside my own bewilderment.
x.
Adrift inside my own bewilderment,
I cannot tell the body politic
from what my body feels—we both have spent
this year of our unsteadiness too sick
to stand or waiting for the next attack.
There’s hearing loss. And later there’s a whine
we only notice late at night, a thwack,
a buzz that warns us of our quick decline.
It’s true we’re worsening and can’t delay
the unavoidable: our cities cleave,
our bridges tremble high above the bay,
our thoroughfares disintegrate. I grieve
our health (I know the metaphor’s absurd),
unsure of what I’ve said or what I’ve heard.
xi.
Unsure of what I’ve said or what I’ve heard,
I try to leave the electronic flood
of likes and followers, how truth is stirred
into the cyberswamp, the marsh, the mud
of fakery, a bog that mummifies
what’s real. A thousand years from now, they’ll find
our words preserved inside the peat, our lies
still full of teeth, our sentences enshrined
beneath the centuries of muck. They’ll say
our posts were punishment or sacrifice,
how people of this era drove away
their fears. I stop refreshing my device:
when words are thick as sludge and fraudulent,
it is impossible to orient.
xii.
It is impossible to orient
the class when students don’t believe in such
a thing as real. Today, I am intent
on teaching them to use the sense of touch,
how in their poems there might be a hand
that reaches out to hold a piece of cloth,
its satin sheen. They do not understand.
Describe the linty flutter of a moth,
I say, a petal’s silk, the scratch of wool
against the skin. What is the opposite
of touch—that’s what my students feel, the pull
of the intangible. And I admit
that even I am wafting through a maze,
a body lost within these vaporous days.
xiii.
A body, lost within these vaporous days,
could be forgiven for its fears. And yet
I can’t forgive the man who disobeys
the sign to stand SIX FEET AWAY. Forget
civility. I watch his twisting lips—
unmasked and furious, the spittle sprayed
into the air, the way his fingertips
reach out to touch my face—and I’m afraid.
He’s loud, after the hush of quarantine,
the nebulizer’s mist, the groceries
left quietly beside my door. He’s mean.
I tell him I’m high risk. I whisper please.
I turn, attempting to avoid his gaze,
the murkiness, the smog, the thickened haze.
vix.
The murkiness, the smog, the thickened haze
in me are hard to love. I praise the sand,
instead, which shifts beneath the wind. I praise
the water like a body and the land.
I praise the sky, a woven coverlet
that’s laid across the insubstantial skin
of everything. I praise the air, its sweat
that sheens the afternoon. I praise the thin,
resilient rain, how it returns each night
to leave a luster on the lawn. I thank
the sodden earth, its perfume impolite
and muddy on my hands, the loam that’s dank
beneath my nails. I even praise my fear—
my ear is filled with ocean for a year.
xi.
My ear is filled with ocean for a year,
a sound like swishing liquid in the brain,
and all the distant noises disappear:
the hale, the thunder at the windowpane.
The house is churning water. Floors distend.
The walls are waves about to crash on me,
this soggy vertigo that has no end,
a dizzy tide that tugs me out to sea.
My thoughts are fog. I stumble through each word,
adrift inside my own bewilderment,
unsure of what I’ve said or what I’ve heard.
It is impossible to orient
a body lost within these vaporous days,
the murkiness, the smog, the thickened haze.