If there were a necessary truth in any story
Directed by David Lynch, it had to have been
The inevitable humming of machines. And you,
If you sat in the quietest luxury hotel room,
You’d have heard, if you cared, a constant hum.
Hospitals and airplane cabins went without saying.
So did cities, suburbs, the insides of automobiles,
The railroad intersections clicking at night,
The vast grain silos humming on the plains.
But even in what remained as designated
Wilderness (meaning it was not wilderness),
If you’d slept out under the stars as often
As I’d done, you should have noticed the hum
Of the jets that almost never abandon the sky.
As a guest in a modest house in the foothills
Of a sternly massive mountain range, I heard
The hum of local machines incessantly, I listened,
From dawn to the next dawn, to the refrigerator
And the furnace coming on, the faint thrum
Of all the wiring, the plumbing, the passing
Cars and trucks outside, the freight trains
Mourning through the unseen canyons beyond.
I was not bothered, not so bothered as some.
The machines as they functioned reminded me
What a fine-tooled work of art humanity had become,
What an ornament Earth had bodied forth
From her continually spinning, slowly slowing,
Ever faintly humming dynamo of lives.
If there were a necessary truth in any story
It would had to have been something hummed.
No comments:
Post a Comment