“Why is it that buzzing in the ear ceases if one makes a sound?
Is it because a greater sound drives out the less?”
—Hippocrates

Acoustic Masking, Purple

Spiny dye-murex’s silent slide
into extraction, plum-loud,
mulberry-loud, a molluscy
(sort of Jackson Pollocky)
abstraction of Tyrian purple
and magenta, a sea snail
bursting surface, a bright-loud
juicy blister of light, a gram
and a half of sound
from an intertidal of twelve
times a thousand murices.

Acoustic Masking, Yellow

Toadflax’s insipid butter pallor—
a sound-shallow contrast
to its long-spurred lower lip’s
jutting angry egg yolk. Quiet

compared to chrome yellow,
the yelling yellow sunflowers’
east-facing heads, a wind-
flustered field, mustard-rowdy,

yellow disk, solar eclipse,
thousand suns.

Acoustic Masking, Cup Fungi

Scarlet cup screams meat,
veins, a wide-open throat,
a gorge of red.

Clabber dots clot a gasp,
a vocal-curdle, expect expect-
oration, nothing more.

Bone bowl, vinegar cup
(a wishbone soaked in acid,
collagen evicts calcium),

a malleable greyness,
a tinge of violet,
a rumour, a buzz.

A Thrush in the Syringa Sings

Mauve and mauve and mauve,
pure-tone mauve,

lilac pipe,
ventriloqual.

A pith-peep,
a syrinx-syringe.

An end-blown
bird flute,

an ear toot.

Noise x 10

1: the confusion of ears and stomach.

2: a vestibular collision, shattering icicles.

3: river ice breaking; aching teeth.

4: the paradox of noise that does not exist that exists.

5: white noise is a downpour of every colour in the chromatic scale.

6: noise combined with speed is grey.

7: noise combined with stasis is nausea.

8: nautical wobbliness; watery vacillation.

9. a dicey lifeline; a cataract; a crash.

10: the throat sends tentacles into the ears.

Tympanum

A single-egg clutch.
Half a pearl, a pea,
a hummingbird egg.

Membrane taut
over broken shell,
birdsong recomposed

as wobbly yolk, as the
20-decibel vibrations
of the jewel-throated
bird’s wings.

Note: “A Thrush in the Syringa Sings” takes its title from a line in a Basil Bunting ode