HIVE DANCER by Edith Rylander (audio clip)

RAGE, A GEEZER TUNE by Edith Rylander

I will not jump up and scream!
I will not injure this sweet occasion:
Music, friends, blue sky with birds in it,
The smell of mesquite smoke and the taste of beer.

Under Arizona winter sun
Our old friend
Yanks out his hearing aids, plunks them on the table.
"Thirty-six hundred apiece, and I swear I hear
Better without the goddamn things than with them!"

(His wife, like other wives
I've encountered in this situation
Is shaking her head, No, no.)

"They tell me if I wear them, I can hear the birds.
What do I care if I hear the birds?"

Rage flames up in me; for a second
I am a little deaf myself.
My skin is hot and tight, every hair on my scalp
Rises as to a dreadful danger,
And words fly into my mouth
Which I almost shriek.

Dear God, how I hate resignation!
Yes, sometimes life just throws you down
And stomps on your chest, and all you can do then
Is assess the damage and try not to hurt too bad.
But Old Friend sounds almost smug-at what?
Science that can sample Mars,
But not bridge the gap between song and synapse,
Or the triumphant resistance of his body
To the attempt to mend him?

But I do not leap to my feet,
(A more difficult thing to do
Than it was ten years ago)
I do not shriek the words flaming into my head,
"When I can't hear the birds I would just as soon be dead!"
(As if I will have any choice in the matter.)
Anyway, under the circumstances,
I might have to yell those words
More than once to be understood.

The thirtyish guy with guitar
Is singing about shipwreck,
Great waves whelming a whole crew down
Into terminal silence.
He has not begun to imagine
The droop and shrivel, the seeping away,
The slow suck, the gravelly grinding down
Of one little thing and another little thing.

Rage mends nothing. I am left with prayer,
"Lord, give me song in my season,"
Though I do not believe in that God,
And what I want
Are the ears eyes skin joints synapses muscles
Appetites and the capacity to feed them
Of twenty-five, but I'd settle for forty-five,
And while you're at it, implausible Deity,
Would you bring the same for my husband?

The singer strums a last chord, puts by his guitar.
"We're gonna take a little break now, folks."
Conversations pick up, there is laughter,
Somebody throws on wood and the fire crackles.
And in the little silence
Before the P.A. system cranks up "Long Tall Sally"
I hear the distant-seeming
Call of a canyon wren,
And drink it, drink it in,
Till all of the song is done.

from HIVE DANCER by Edith Rylander