Mosquito at my ear—
does it think
I’m deaf?
-Issa
We are in the dark, watching a film that explores the ways human noise destroys the ocean’s delicate habitat.
*
Our gardener blows leaves in five or six yards each day. He is not wearing ear protection. Can he hear his wife? Does he want to?
*
Sting has admitted to having hearing loss, but says he doesn’t like wearing hearing aids.
*
Anniversary weekend: an annual journey with two other couples, all married in the fall, after harvest. Each year, one pair chooses a destination. We have done this for more than thirty years.
*
Issa’s life was sorrowful—the deaths of his first wife and three children, an unsuccessful second marriage, a third marriage.
*
Anniversary weekend: it’s no longer about romance. It’s about sight-seeing, eating and telling people how long we’ve been married. Altogether, one hundred fourteen years.
*
The United States Navy developed SONAR to track Soviet submarines. Also used to study the vocalizations of whales.
*
Singing humpback whales,
deep moans, sighs, buzzes and clicks,
love’s opera drowned
by cargo ships and vessels
heavy with human desire.
*
Ships use cavitation to map the ocean floor, searching for oil. The bursting air bubbles create explosions that are intolerable to sea life.
*
According to Hass, the name Issa means a single bubble in steeping tea. Champagne to celebrate. Bubbles mapping our brains.
*
Sting says that with a hearing aid, he hears more than he wants to hear.
*
Is my friend’s husband becoming deaf? Or is he not listening to me? Several times I spoke to him and he didn’t answer.
*
Anniversary weekend: plans of bike rides, hiking and kayaking. Instead rain and wind, afternoons spent with pre-recorded ball games and idle chatter.
—
Rebecca Dougherty is a sixth generation Californian who has lived in the Sacramento Valley her entire life. She has graduate degrees in education and technology and taught elementary school for ten years. She belongs to a poetry workshop group. Her poems have been published in Volume Poetry.
