David Hoefer

RADIO GRAVEYARD

The prodigal songs of our youth — far-away croons about mangoes, about
    fullbacks in love — return from a spell in the mountains. They boil over
    from ether, splashing dials in the radio graveyard.

My hobbyist friend's radio chalet. Vault of voicewrecks off a living room
    choked with china. (The old tree house code lets us in.) Switched-on books,
    memorycast safe house. Capacious womb at the center of sound!

Yesteryear brands: Crosley, Kennedy, Torodyne, FADA. Avalanche, sweet tubes!
    conveyors of sky. RCA, Emerson, Spartan and Grebe. Squawk cathedrals,
    standoffish as a rose!

Radio, the fourth or fifth Rome. Vacuum city leaping with God. Radio myth:
    a single sense hears the soul in matter. Modern myth: radio is matter
    going soulward.

We sit down to wild feed. The table budgets space to loops, sets, earphones,
    batteries of barking water. With twirl and nudge, my friend navigates
    popways. Spectrum — electronic kitsch — falls to an early three-dialer.
    I copy his stoop and his genius; all of us — him, his genius and me —
    perishing in the shrug of tomorrow.

Sonorous design from shouts of invention. Marconi v. Tesla, De Forest v.
    Armstrong. Nathan B. Stubblefield, ground conductor of air, first speaker
    of wireless. Weird tales from his shack: death by starvation in pre-television
    glow. Hedy Lamarr's spread-spectrum puzzle. Marinetti's radio arming
    the Future...

...swarm grammar...signal gourmands...multiplexed whispers, floor of the new
    dimension...

Tuning in, superheterodyne supplement to Philosophy of Will. Brushfire arias
    in our golem-blank eyes. Protocol of the elders of volume...

...we in our supple receivers: no-limit capacitors...brain-to-brain messages
    ...Perpetual Troubleshooting v. Warning-Label Tomorrow...

Those grand old songs and movements, godsends to the radio graveyard.
    Every politician a commercial for silence, every speech reducing the ear!
 

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