All night he lies awake tuning the sky, <br />tuning the night with its fat crackle of static, <br />with its melancholy love songs crooning <br />across the rainy air above Verdun <br />& the autobahn's blue suicidal dawn. <br /> <br />Wherever he lives there is the same unwomaned bed, <br />the ashtrays overflowing their reproaches, <br />his stained fingers on the tuning bar, fishing <br />for her voice in a deep mirrorless pond, <br />for the tinsel & elusive fish <br />(brighter than pennies in water & more wished upon)- <br />the copper-colored daughter of the pond god. <br /> <br />He casts for her, the tuning bar his rod, <br />but only long-dead lovers with their griefs <br />haunt him in Piaf's voice- <br />(as if a voice could somehow only die <br />when it was sung out, utterly). <br /> <br />He finally lies down and drowns the light <br />but the taste of her rises, brackish, <br />from the long dark water of her illness <br />& his grief is terrible as drowning <br />when he reaches for the radio again. <br /> <br />In the daytime, you hardly know him; <br />he walks in a borrowed calm. <br /> <br />You cannot sense <br />his desperation in the dawn <br />when the abracadabras of the birds <br />conjure another phantom day. <br /> <br />He favors cities which blaze all night, <br />hazy mushrooms of light under the blue <br />& blinking eyes of jets. <br />But when the lamps across the way go under, <br />& the floorboards settle, <br />& the pipes fret like old men gargling- <br />he is alone with his mouthful of ghosts, <br />his tongue bitter with her unmourned death, <br />& the terrible drowning. <br /> <br />I watch from my blue window <br />knowing he does not trust me, <br />though I know him as I know my ghosts, <br />though I know his drowning, <br />though, since that night when all harmony broke for me, <br />I have been trying to tune the sky.<br /><br />Erica Jong<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/his-tuning-of-the-night/
