There was a man whose boyhood was spent
questing for the sound of the never-before-heard.
He was a listener at keyholes in the doors of empty rooms.
Sightless, he conjured symphonies from the powdering
of plaster and the settling of floorboards; the scuttle
of a beetle on the parquet carried to him like the roll of timpani.

His parents, anxious at his reverie, chided him for eavesdropping;
were still more alarmed when they threw those same doors open
onto scenes of utter tranquility. In the night he listened
as they spoke, in the delirium of dreams,
of banished brothers, and dead children, of secret lovers
and of creditors whose bills remained unpaid.

At school his physics teachers taught him the rudiments
of musicology. In his notebook he sketched the shivering vibrato
of sound-waves in an organ-pipe, the ripple
and reverberation on the plucked strings of a violin.
“Every object has its note,” they told him,
as he set the vessels ringing in a home-made glass harmonium,

constructed tea-chest basses from the braces of his friends,
playing to delighted audiences of boys whose trousers
bagged around their ankles. He watched, in dreams,
as bridges snapped to the unbroken stamp of soldiers on the march.
The play of waves on the beachfront at Montpellier
brought to land the aftershock of storms in the Bay of Biscay.