A dark poem with a familiar theme from David Wagoner.
Night Song from the Apartment Below
The argument begins. One voice is overcoming
another because it’s had it, it’s had enough
of all this shit and, unaccompanied, rises
to the edge of screaming and past it
till the column of air in that throat has nearly abandoned
everything under it. Only the vault of the forehead
and the bridge of the nose are left to resonate.
An abrupt pause. A brief intermission.
Lotte Lehmann, who knew all there was to know
about singing, said in the upper register
one should always have two notes in reserve
which one never uses.
And now the second voice
comes lurching up and out of the dungeon
beneath the memory of the other, from as deep
as the torture chamber of the diaphragm,
offering to surrender everything
imaginable, hope, wine, money, love,
credit cards, even the need to be touched.
In the following silence, the long silence,
those of us already lying down
in our own forms of darkness are listening
in the name of mercy for the next wrong note.