Blue Noise

Belly to branch, the sapsucker drills

the maple’s well, drumming

the trunk, its red throat thrumming.

I hear its work before I see it, willing

myself toward the cadence, scanning

the tree. The sounds stop. It’s spooky—

this shift to nothing—being completely

narrowed, a finished thing. My father

rattled me like that: behind a bed-

room door, the loaded thrust

of his threats hammering our walls

with vibrato. Worst was the ghost note,

that muted tone that, like wind threshed

suddenly against itself, obscured

the sum of my mother. I could hear

her, almost, in the fissure between fear

and fight: shirtless, as she made a break

for the hall, her damp hair twisted

up in a towel now spilling rivulets, wet

sheen of a wing erupting into flight.