“Soundings"

This morning I notice the micro-sounds of things, a deep amplified resonance—objects touching objects, scraping, ringing, as if I were listening to Toru Takemitsu pick up a bell and brush it with a perfectly designed plectrum. A ceramic coffee mug placed on a granite bonsai stand not quite level gives off an unbalancing grate that see-saws up my arm, the scrape of the leg of a wooden chair against the hard wood floor—itself a complex bowing of the room against its tangents. A large ceramic vase carried to the sink to rinse after the flowers, the sallow swill at the bottom starting to reek. Cautious for all the bowls I've broken in this operation, including the heavy cut glass punch bowl that sliced my right hand so deeply I still feel electricity each time I pull a sweater off. I treat the vase like a delicate instrument, turning it under the lathe of hot water, hearing the gush—and then, despite my care, the tang of a curved edge against the porcelain ... a deeper, more oblique glass harmonica Monteverdi in
his underworld might have amplified.

listening more carefully / wasp nest / in wind chime