Listen

                                 — for Judith Butler

ear trumpet, crinkly hair, scowl

I’m reading about Beethoven

how he lives alone

when I stand still, when my mother

stands close & speaks slow & clear

I can hear, or I read her lips

Beethoven listens to his heart

his lungs, the whistle inside his nose

he cuts marks with a quill into stone

I see paper rustle, hear my dinner

chewed, outside is angry face

passion that fails to convey

Beethoven thinks tones, sees harmony

string to reed to air, doesn’t care

what anyone else hears

I am not an island, I am an island

I am searching for some way

to a threshold of livability