Loud Music

 My stepdaughter and I circle round and round.

You see, I like the music loud, the speakers
throbbing, jam-packing the room with sound whether
Bach or rock and roll, the volume cranked up so
each bass notes is like a hand smacking the gut.

But my stepdaughter disagrees.
 She is four
and likes the music decorous, pitched below
her own voice-that tenuous projection of self.

With music blasting, she feels she disappears,
is lost within the blare, which in fact I like.

But at four what she wants is self-location
and uses her voice as a porpoise uses 
its sonar: to find herself in all this space.

If she had a sort of box with a peephole
and looked inside, what she'd like to see would be
herself standing there in her red pants, jacket,
yellow plastic lunch box: a proper subject
for serious study.
 But me, if I raised
the same box to my eye, I would wish to find
the ocean on one of those days when wind
and thick cloud make the water gray and restless
as if some creature brooded underneath,
a rocky coast with a road along the shore
where someone like me was walking and has gone.

Loud music does this, it wipes out the ego,
leaving turbulent water and winding road,
a landscape stripped of people and language-
how clear the air becomes, how sharp the colors.

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