NOISE

I don't know if it's awol during daylight hours

or if the tinnitus in my left ear is merely

dimmer when I'm out and about my business,

its whine too fine a frequency, drowned in the din

of the city's traffic so I forget it's there

until, horizontal in the dark, I'm ready

to receive it. Or, like now, it makes its nuisance

presence known when I sit before a blank screen

wondering what to write. I shouldn't complain

too loudly; as auditory snafus go, mine

is pretty minor. My sister's hyperacusia—

which has plagued her since, doing foley work for film,

she was bombarded by a misfired mortar shell

of sound—makes the normal noise of living hard

to bear. I can't pinpoint when my little hum

got going, don't know if it's grown louder or if

one day it simply fluttered down and lit upon

my shoulder, singing. It's probably the product

of damage less traumatic than my sister's:

my imperfect employment of ear defenders

on the airport tarmac and in the thrumming innards

of the Hawkers I offloaded. I remember

landing in Hall Beach one summer and, once the prop

stopped spinning, I cracked the cargo hatch to such

an immaculate bare flash of silence that I

half-wondered if I'd been struck deaf—until Jonah

fired up the forklift and rumbled up to greet us.

Flying home, I sat mid-cabin in the empty

freighter, reading Dylan Thomas poems aloud,

thinking, wrongly, that the pilots wouldn't hear me

with their headsets on, over the racket of those

Rolls Royce engines I'd parked myself between. And then

there was the neighbour who heard me reading Horace

through the wall in the wee hours and asked, awkwardly,

if I prayed at night. And were the voices that I heard

as I lay abed in Resolute Bay the dark

season hallucinations of a man left

too much alone by the shore of the Northwest Passage—

or signals picked up by my fillings? I listed

to the static of the HF radio enough

to know the tricks the magnetosphere plays on the ear.

John Cage, in his quest for perfect silence, encased

himself in an anechoic chamber, only

to experience the flow and sizzle of his

blood and nerves as auricular phenomena.

I once tried unsuccessfully to give a message

to a woman on a train, until, looking up

from her book, she switched her hearing aid on. “Sorry,”

she said, “I prefer to hear nothing when I read.”

Naively, I've since caught myself at odd times

envying that option, prone to distraction

as I am—but then it strikes me that an intermittent

buzzing could mean that I am yet among the quick.