Autophony
by J. Preston Witt
I was half of a young, broke couple
and very much in love.
After we married, we lived
with my large family in a one-room
apartment near the train tracks.
Our sex had to happen in silence,
or the grandparents and great-grandparents
snoring nearby would wake.
To manage, we learned to time our orgasms
for when the train passed
and shook the apartment,
when the groans and squeals
of the wheels could disguise our own.
In that short minute, love was loud.
It was most romantic
to come with a train, but it made me
worry that, when we moved out and into
an apartment of our own,
a bigger place with thick walls
and no trains to disturb our sleep,
love would not follow us there.
God looked at us only once in our lives,
at our birth and at our death,
which, from far enough away,
and with the practiced use
of a gravitational lens,
was the same moment.
Life was either a singular gesture,
or cosmic pocket lint and static.
I was sexually ambidextrous,
though wrote better with one than the other.
Sex involved a phase change,
solids rubbing together until the heat
melted us into two or more
liquids mixing, which was why
I knew friction to be a virtue.
Children needed elders within reach
or else grew up believing the past
was dead instead of very much alive
and wandering from the bathroom to the bed.
To so much as walk across the tenement,
our children would have to learn to eat light,
chew both seed and tree,
watch the rain drizzle against the glass
and think ice and sand.
For these reasons and many others,
our stay with the family lengthened.
Life became so dear for a time.
If I lost anything,
I could just remember how
it felt in my hand,
and it returned to me
already warm.
Through the window,
I often saw a waterbird
fly against the northern wind
without moving.
It was necessary to convince
everyone in my head
of an idea in order to maintain it,
and new people grew in there daily.
I stayed primed and ready to teach
each new arrival to love who I loved
for fear the old ones
might one day be outvoted.
A young majority could be fickle,
might turn with the wind,
choose someone else,
and leave us still together
but defeated.Wanting
to raise the volume on my headphones,
I increased the speed
on the treadmill until I was sprinting
through the living room.
Many men haven’t moved
laterally in decades, and you saw it
in their jaws when they talked
and walked and bent over.
Some boys grew older,
but the first funeral I attended
was for a boy
whose first funeral was his own.
His face became a photo
on a casket and I asked,
Why the face?
Where’s the rest of him?
The face is an attempt
to make one’s sensory organs attractive
to another person’s sensory organs,
a consequence of what matters to you
mattering to me.
The heart, too, has scent neurons
and sniffed blood all day—
one could always be more paranoid.
The feeling frequented, the vertigo
of a slipping into a discrete universe
of infinite, transcendent persecution.
I knew other people existed,
but not everyone all the time.
The year the grandparents all sickened and passed,
the trains stopped.
Construction, an incident of desperation
on the tracks,
a temporary discontinuation
down the line.
We were still childless.
In the endemic quiet that followed,
I sought out jaundiced eyes,
developed a fetish for those loudly ill and dying.
I found them profoundly sexy.
Their haunted pupils, their vulnerability,
their determination to find a way out.
I waited for my own in the mirror.
Sometimes the ceiling felt like a cathedral;
other times it was so low I hit my head.
The walls inflated and deflated
while I held onto the way I was,
sleeping late and eating ravenously
inside our pulsing aching lung.
Most whales have gone quiet
but one whale made the news
He’d strayed far from the rest of his species.
Deaf, echolocationless, he still sung
but his distorted frequency missed the listening bones
of his herd and mate.
Poor grave radio of the sea,
no one who heard his songs
sent with such care and longing—
all apology and scorn
and too casual requests
for the when and where—
would ever claim to have suffered
more than he.
What would you do if allergic to love?
If it made you yellow and thickly ill?
Would you stay sick with sound,
bray, bray with nauseous breath
against the dying of the light?
Or would you empty your lungs of it
and be cured?
Would you go off silent and well,
asking yourself,
Why am I wet where I am wet,
why am I sticky there?
As a child I thought of sewers and cried
when I learned that star
spelled backwards was rats.
One night I tried to explain
through the buzz
of our refrigerator headboard
and the pitter-patter of little
tenants in the walls,
how I had stepped up or down from love.
I wondered if it was always only that,
clutching onto someone and not knowing
where you were,
at the bottom
of the curve or the top.
Each night the train didn’t come
was another mark upon the graph
until one day I stepped through
a dotted line and found myself
a full standard deviation away.
This was the worst way to say the truth,
that statistically speaking,
I had lost the majority of our love.
I still prayed for the birth
of some noisy tyrant
who might overthrow this failure
of internal governance,
but more often I fantasized
about the abusive and illicit.
I hoped to come home and discover
you lying in bed with my father,
though this would surely reveal me
to be one incapable of violence,
and so perhaps of justice,
cowardice or worse would steady
my forgetting hand,
but what then?
I aspired to be a man who knew
exactly where his keys were
when it came time to leave.
My mother was never able
to think of what to wish for,
and I became the same.
We both pretended to think
at the cake, then blew.
When she died,
Dad believed her soul jumped
into the new dog she’d ordered
because it arrived the same day.
The owner, all condolences,
asked if we still wanted the pup,
and Dad said, Yes, he did,
they’d go around again, and this time
he would get things right.
Like her, it never barked.
The trains didn’t return,
and we bore no children.
Every year, I sang less
and added more cream
to my coffee.
Mother cried at night
unless allowed to sleep
between us in the bed,
and since one excuse
was as good as any other,
we let her.
All that love was
was deciding what organ
to be deceived by,
and I trusted you
to lie to me
in ways we could both survive.