POETRY BY
DAVID WEINSTOCK
SOUND MEN
In between words, there are silences.
My sound man finds them all.
He marks them with a pencil
and snicks them out with his blade.
Brown silence in various sizes
ticks into the wastebasket:
a quick breath as long as your finger.
a pregnant pause you could wrap around your waist.
Hour after hour I watch him,
my sound engineer and his razor blade,
paring my interviews into clear speech.
How patiently he corrects every speaker's diction,
how gently he teaches the tongue-tied
to speak clearly as Demosthenes.
Yet I've never known a sound man
who didn't cherish a shoe box full
of some great man's stutters and slips
and a secret plan to splice them back together
into one long nightmarish stammer,
into something truly unspeakable.
David Weinstock is a former staff writer for the L.L. Bean catalog.
Helives a life filled with wonder in Middlebury,
Vermont, where he is a member of the Spring Street Poets.
Back
to Home | Back
to Poetry