~
After I Bought Noise Cancelling Headphones
my kids became quieter. One might say tolerable
as did the neighbor’s various hunting dogs,
their baying no longer alerting me to full moon nights.
Wearing them during chores, I pushed the lawnmower
down long rows after it ran out of gas, its rattle
over the bumpy ground a bit tamer than its usual
engine-running, blade-swaying shake. I missed
stories of my wife’s day, but not my favorite songs—
Oh, brilliant bluetooth, oh, satisfying wifi stream,
oh, the thrum of potent cello notes at relaxation time!
Would that I could shut off my vision, not see
the violence of police recorded on someone’s phone
popping up when I scroll on mine, not see
death tolls from terrorism or disease in colorful charts
fill a newspaper’s folio spread. But, no, I do not
want to become senseless—how then could I speak?
But why, my wife writes on my always-present notepad,
won’t you take the headphones off sometime, listen
to her, the kids, the tree frogs singing in the meadow
now that spring has turned the night into a brisk chill?
Because, I say (speaking at a volume I cannot determine),
then I would not know the joy of my head on the pillow
turned to the window in a barkless night to discover
moonlight like a perfect candle spilling into the room,
a flush I hadn’t expected just outside the faultless panes.
~
Gary Leising
(additional pieces by Gary Leising in this issue)
Arts & Crafts Lied To Us
Gary Leising is the author of the book The Alp at the End of My Street (Brick Road Poetry Press 2014). He has also published three poetry chapbooks: The Girl with the JAKE Tattoo (Two of Cups Press 2015), Temple of Bones (Finishing Line Press 2013), and Fastened to a Dying Animal (Pudding House 2010). He lives in Clinton, New York, with his wife and two sons, where he teaches creative writing and poetry as a professor of English.