Echo

1 My ear amps whistle like they are singing to Echo, goddess of noise, the raveled knot of tongues, of blaring birds, consonant crumbs of dull doorbells, sounds swamped in my misty hearing aid tubes. Gaudí believed in holy sound and built a cathedral to contain it, pulling hearing men from their knees as though atheism is a kind of deafness. Who would turn down God? Even though I have not heard the golden decibels of angels, I have been living in a noiseless palace where the doorbell is pulsating light and I am able to answer. 2 What? a word that keeps looking in mirrors like it is in love with its own volume. What? I am a one-word question, a one-man patience test. What? What language would we speak without ears? What? Is paradise a world where I hear everything? What? How will my brain know what to hold if it has too many arms? 3 The day I clear out my dead father’s flat, I throw away boxes of molding LPs, Garvey, Malcolm X, Mandela, speeches on vinyl. I find a TDK cassette tape on the shelf, smudged green label Raymond Speaking. I play the tape in his vintage cassette player and hear my two-year-old voice chanting my name Antrob and dad’s laughter crackling in the background not knowing I couldn’t hear the word “bus” and wouldn’t until I got my hearing aids. Now I sit here listening to the space of deafness — Antrob Antrob Antrob 4 And no one knew what I was missing until a doctor gave me a handful of Legos and said to put a brick on the table every time I heard a sound. After the test I still held enough bricks in my hand to build a house and call it my sanctuary, call it the reason I sat in saintly silence during my grandfather’s sermons when he preached the good news, I only heard as Babylon’s babbling echoes. 5 And if you don’t catch nothing then something wrong with your ears — they been tuned to de wrong frequency — Kei Miller