The Cartographer of Lost Sounds

I.

I am the cartographer of lost sounds,

A surveyor of the silent, acoustic ground.

My map is not of ink, but of a fading vibration,

A desperate, hopeful, sonic preservation.

I track the ghost of a slamming door,

From a house that stands, love, no more.

The specific creak on the second stair,

In the midnight hush of a worried care.

The purr of a cat, now just a dent in the chair's old cushion,

A rhythm ended, a hollow, furry rushing.

I seek the echo of a whistle, sharp and clear,

That once called dogs and children near.

The frantic hum of a now-still bee,

The rustle of leaves on a phantom tree.

The first wet gurgle of a newborn's cry,

A sound that painted the whole sky.

The scratch of a pen on a love letter's page,

Fueling a long-dissolved, passionate rage.

I collect these fragments, these sonic shells,

Rescuing their stories from time's dry wells.

II.

My tools are memory, a silent, tuning fork,

That hums in the dark of my internal work.

A silver bowl to catch the falling rain,

To distill its patter, its liquid refrain.

A net of spider-silk, finely spun,

To trap the last notes of a setting sun.

I have jars of glass, with labels worn and faint,

Holding the essence of a forgotten saint's complaint.

One holds the thunder of a childhood fear,

Another, the whisper that dried a tear.

There is a vial of laughter, from a party in '82,

A specific, joyous, harmonic hue.

A box contains the silence after a final goodbye,

A heavy, thick quiet, no sigh can rectify.

I catalogue them all in a ledger of air,

A museum of sounds, beyond compare.

III.

My greatest quest, my obsessive, lonely hunt,

Is for the sound of the world's very first front.

Not a bang, not a crack, not a roar or a scream,

But the breath before being, the hum of the dream.

The sound of nothing deciding to be something,

A vowel from the void, a celestial strumming.

I have climbed the highest, most windswept peaks,

Where the air is so thin, the very atmosphere squeaks.

I have dove to the trenches, where pressure defies,

And crushes all noise into a low, mournful sighs.

I have pressed my ear to the bark of an oak,

Whose rings hold the memory of lightning's first stroke.

I have listened to stones, worn smooth by the sea,

For the grind of the continents, breaking so free.

IV.

And in my search, I have found other things:

The sound that a fallen angel's broken wing makes,

A soft, tragic susurrus, for heaven's own sake.

The color of silence, which is not black or white,

But a deep, shifting violet, at the edge of the night.

I have heard the future, a low, distant chime,

An algorithm's rhythm, keeping perfect time.

I have captured the sound of a soul taking flight,

A single, clear note, piercing through the night.

It is not a scream, nor a whisper, nor a song,

But a resonance where all broken things belong.

V.

And now I am old, my maps are near done,

My jars are all filled, my battles are won.

I sit in my room, with its whispers and tones,

A kingdom of phantoms, of musical bones.

And I realize the sound I was searching to find,

The original note, was there all the time.

It was not in the crash, or the birth, or the start,

But the steady, slow rhythm of my own beating heart.

The percussion of life, the baseline, the drum,

From which all the other lost sounds had once come.

And the final lost sound, the one I must keep,

Is the sound of this map, falling into a sleep.

The rustle of paper, as I lay it down,

To be found by another, in some other town.

A new cartographer, with a younger ear,

To continue the work, to conquer the fear

That sounds are just lost, that they fade and they die,

When they're only waiting, for you and I,

To listen, to capture, to remember, to hold,

The universe's story, in whispers untold.