Just Short of Hearing

by Donald Brandis

trees most stubborn persist
their silence is linked hands
among these campsites

no notice? watch
it run beneath screaming children’s
tiny gap between urge and act

boat unzipping the lake
birdcall sound of plates scraped
of seeds spit against a tin roof

wheeze lift sighing straining
bowel tones of single passing cars
slow around a road all bends and trees

narrow hum of insects too small
too fast to be identified
filed in a closet of known sounds

that intriguing in-gathered almost-sound
of trees like a single long-held note
on in-breath, on out-breath

clever bastards
if I’d had a hundred years
with nothing else to do

an unsound measured by what
it has outlasted, what
it’s shed though strangely

other shorter higher sounds
- this one would be deepest bass -
hang on it like notes on a spindle