e u s t a c i e s

I wake every day
not to birds but
to eight hours of
an underlying hum
from engines, heavy machinery.
The Baldoni house, across the street,
is becoming a bank branch,
a very posh one.
North Shore wouldn't have set foot here
when the neighborhood
tanneries were open. Italian and Sicilian
were spoken then, in kitchens and
among schoolchildren.
Birds too, lived here, flocks of them,
full of other languages.
I heard an ornithologist say
we've paid a price for this
current "standard of living",
that people my age have heard more birds,
have given witness to abundance.
Gone.
Wasn't that long ago either,
that wildlife inhabited local places.
Vacant spaces, without lots of,
that's what I know now.
But this absence isn't silent.
It's a working, daily presence of human-generated noise,
filling, spilling into my studio, my bedroom, my art.
I resist all this the only way I know how,
now making things that are quiet,
punctuated by remnants of other sounds,
still found around the edges of
where I live.
I keep my ear awake, in the air, where are found the fewer,
sounds, the seeped-in songs of another belonging.