We know the left side belongs to the devil,
           that he sits there in dusk, who was light,
           whose loss of heaven gave us art.
               - Paul Nelson, “Lobes”

               The Missing Ear

     I put my good ear to the rail,
let my stunted one, slightly darker, grow to the light.
Any day, I can hear trembling
in the tracks, measure distance
by how loud the brassy chord
cuts the air. When it comes,
I can’t hear Mother’s warning, 
nor Bach’s chorale from the white steeple –
the one I played by heart
on the pink piano of the Children’s Ward.
Even Father’s car, stuttering
in the carport, unsteadily delivering me
to the depot, seems to lose its voice,
silenced as the crossing lights descend.

     I remember winters of surgery,
wan doctors glossing their smooth  fingers
over last year’s scars, the tiny crosses
on my chest still red and hard.
And they said, We’ll lay another row
of stitches here, little train tracks.
Little train tracks on the frontiers
of my life. Mother squeezed my hand
as the sonorous brass chorused around the curve
into Leominster, and we rode the Boston-Maine line
straight to the horizon.    
                                     And squeezed again
as she left the Children’s Ward
for South Station, and home. Then

the nurses poised above me like sails
to the land of the dead. Metal rails
of the gurney raised between us,
green ether-mask growing over my face,
and ether the color of sunlight,
and the silver bedpan strapped to my chin.
I battled my eyes open to damn white light,
two white-masked doctors cutting above me.
Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone,
the ersatz ear was born. A lump of raspberry
shaped by unsteady hands. In twenty years,
we’ll know enough to get it right.

I knew enough to carry myself
at an angle to light,
tilting my head as if
from the weight of white bandages.
I knew the sweet nothing of drugged sleep,
one fat pill every four hours
until I could not feel. The sobs inside
slurred their words, and slept.

     And I awoke to twenty years
of sweet nothings: words whispered into an ear
denied meaning. Every lover whispered her separation.
Every friend’s right-intending words drew blanks.
All those comic-strip balloons
with the words removed, and one actor
anxious to know his script. Words and words and words,

and yes and yes and little understood.
Go to your room, young man. Go to your room. And then music
where I could be lost from them , music
transported from bass to treble clef,
spun from the pressed grooves of records –
wordless music, Bach’s balm on a bee sting
of the soul, unguent after pulling the deep splinter.
Music wove its inexorable way
to the left, the darker side, and healed
the cleft within me, transported my whole cranium
like a great station full of the music
of departure and arrival. 

How then could I put words to music?
To sweeten the train’s brassy song of separation?
Inside, I could hear perfectly.
Inside was as quiet as the velveteen
cushions of a Pullman car.
My twin inner ears tuned to the measure
of some nameless Other, some child-conductor
who mouthed the syllables of his separation.
Station by station as he pulled away, 
he rode the parallel rails to the horizon
where they seemed to meet as one line. 
He mused the sound of words
in perfect quietude, then choired
the voices of separation –
Mother, Father, abandoned one –
sotto voce to the void, and
chorale to the world, in unison. 
I took an odd dictation.

     Until this morning, the lights says It is now.
Mother and Father say, The perfection of the ear
has come. Time to be healed.
                                                  And I hear myself
refuse the doctor’s white hands, refuse
the scalpel that will slice the past from me
and splice some perfect-sounding future.
Something hard and perennial grows from me.
Something stunted, but swallowed and digested
as grief’s memories: how many separations line the rails
when I touch the amulet of my ear.
How much light spills across these bandages,
mummified in the present. How much music
wails from the brass bull of my soul.
And still wrapped in swaddling bands,
something is born beautiful out of the missing –

a lifetime of anaesthetics, now one indefinite
article away, one article of faith away, from an aesthetic:
             What is missing
              makes memory whole.