Jingle Man (05)

The fish-tank can do it, even motors can.
In some timeless continuum purrs the adman
to an air-pump, like Tennyson in his garden
mesmerized by "innumerable murmurs of bees"
or chanting his surname until he was mindless.
Soothing? Gurus answer their own questions,
in another life composing jingles for perfume,
Windsong, the lyric cooing, on my mind.

Great landscape swathes or ashen deserts
viewed faintly through bottle-green windshields
can be spent by humming cross-country to tires.
And as you hum you become attuned to them--
perhaps suspensions hum as much as any apiary.
Murmur your name and your syllables melt
into roadside mirages, one abstract time ago,
your memory the more vivid when imagined.

And machines can stitch these memory gaps
into seamless continuums gurus get to sooner
as when Charlie murmurs to the fish-tank
in this Mount Desert Island greasy spoon.
Windsong: you're on. Perfume I can’t smell
connects me to canals, to corruption beneath
the palace of the Doge, to sewerage flowing
beneath the opulence of domes and spires,
to heaps of flowers rotting in a distillary first.

When artist-adman Charlie Morrow hummed
his jingle, who didn’t buy? Whether humming
aum or nevermore to sump pumps or aquariums
he could connect himself, while participants
tuned into infancy they thought all joyful noise
without libretti or commercials. And who listens
to the lyrics anyway? Humming among others

only drops me into casual abysses or Babels
so quick I can't connect to clear directives or letters.
So, soothing? guru-adman-artist Charlie asks.
But adman, how come mama never warned me
that when I lost semantics in your mantra,
memory would be this much acuter, feel true?

So when you mumble under your breath
you hit the same timbre as your ancestors
when they toyed with hymns or torch-songs
between their similar abdomens or tongues,
whether from contentment or from boredom
in some garage or hospital waiting room.