Cave-in, no echo

Boy with the name and face I don’t remember,
you can stop shouting, I can still hear you.

– Simon Armitage, “The Shout”


I thought about it and thought I heard it—
the shout of a dead man resounding in
muted echo, a murmur like the tinnitus
haunting the ears of my deaf great-uncle.

Uncle Harry heard the suck and build-up
before drums, just the whoosh of the percussion,
mallets falling and throttling air—never striking.
His ears were hollow, lacking anvil to transmit

throbs. I thought the deceased’s yelp resembled
this—the blast of emasculate bellows, coals
already put out, fire unfannable. I thought about it
and thought I could apprehend that sound.

It was more like a pistol: angry retort
with genesis too swift and mechanical
to be heard, or understood as music. The air
was absent: lungs, drums, woodwinds

decadent. Hardly tinnitus and more like
a ton of bricks—constantly falling, burying
a chimney-sweep in his work. He expected
to be coated in ash, and not hard-fired clay.

Cacophony was no echo, nor was it phonic—
the shout of a dead man incomprehensible,
tortured, whimpered, howled. It stole my hollows,
my ears always suffering, precisely caved-in.