The audiogram

maps my soundscape,

plots landslides

in high frequencies.
The audiologist tells me

I hear like the elder I hope to be

in twenty years, or more;

says my cochlear hair cells

are in disorder— dead

or distorted, their thistle tufts

too limp to excite membranes

fire-up neurons,

tune in my brain. 
I am snared by fricatives

and sibilants, plosives and nasals.

I hear ‘tedious break’

for ‘Finnegans Wake’;

detect the plash of ‘water polo’

but not the clarion of ‘Apollo’;

think it’s ‘in the Bible’

when it’s ‘about survival’.
Is it in my DNA?

For centuries my tribe

lived in remote valleys,

chose wives and husbands

as they bred cattle—

from familiar stock.
Now, new hearing aids

snug behind my ears

serenade me, rustle,

make me feel

gift-wrapped in sound.
I think of Ludwig

in Heiligenstadt.

At thirty-two,

surd to distant flute

and shepherd’s song,

he melodied

his mute landscape

in ‘The Pastoral’.




Ludwig in Heiligenstadt – Beethoven had a country house in Heiligenstadt, outside Vienna. In the summer of 1802, he convalesced there to

recover from his worsening deafness and wrote a letter to his brother, expressing his despair. He also started work on the Pastoral Symphony.

The letter was never sent and was discovered in his papers after his death.