by Michael Bettencourt

Created on: July 01, 2008

A MIXING OF VOICES ON AN AUTUMN NIGHT*

* I had been doing short commentaries for the local public radio station for several years. This poem refers to the first one I did for the station.

The radiator spiels, its glocken clanged
by hammers of heat from the basement.
My first commentary airs,
two-and-a-half minutes of pith
in the life of a public radio station.
My too-bass unfamiliar voice,

this johnhenry peening -
they blend and curl, the radiator warming
the frequency of my words,
all this safe and enclosed and renewable.

On the porch is a "harvest sculpture" -
a shirt of used flannel stuffed with leaves,
sausage legs tied down to brittle ankles
snaked into expired sneakers,
a pumpkin crayoned with a gaping mouth
and open unwinking eyes angled at Jupiter
and Mars beginning their newton dance
for Christmas.
Standing on the porch,
moving my cooling toes in my shoes,
I know my voice speeds out in microunits of
electric oomph toward a Jupiter and Mars
blending over a mute effigy,
over hundreds of effigies on
thousands of October porches,
the whole space of space swirled
into a cortex of sparking voices,
into a memory that might last.
I also know that the fuel tank
gets lower with each cold hour.
I move over to the balloonman,
crook his arm, cross a leg,
make him look the thinker,
and with my hand on his crisp shoulder
we resemble, for a moment,
first cousins if not brothers,
each waiting for the tide
of invisible commentaries to swell
back to this porch and lift,
renew, flush blood to the surface.
I hear the harsh recall of
the furnace's rumbling start-up -
back inside to write some more,
leaving the pumpkin's blind eyes
angled up to remind me where to look,
and look again.

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