When the temperature drops, and the wind begins
to moan, through the coils of the air conditioner,
and I wonder how the wind chooses
its notes, yowling quietly
along a certain minor range,
suddenly I understand
that the passageways in the appliance are shaped
to make a D♭, which slides up to
E, F, F♯, and back
down, again, as the breeze freshens
and subsides. The conch has notes in it,
Silurian notes, and the horn of the ram,
the shofar, has notes – instruments
were made to resemble caves, with aeolian
tunnels, through which the gods spoke,
and through the didgeridoo with its long
mourning throat and its mouth of honeybee
wax, and the brasses. And for how many aeons had we
heard the big cats’ sexual
howling before we took their guts and made
strings of them, how many eras had our
primate predecessors groaned, while
making the next generation,
before a homo sapiens
looked at another homo sapiens,
seeing her, or his, body as a
melody-producing shape, wondering what
notes he could get
out of it.
And parents who beat their children, how much
are they in it for the song – to hear, again,
the music that was made on them
back at the beginning, world with end, no amen.

Sharon Olds