from Cantos

Phonograph

A character representing sound. Or. A machine invented by Thomas Edison by which noise is recorded and reproduced. And. An instrument capable of being attached to pianofortes and organs by means of which they are rendered Melographic. Or. Capable of writing any music played upon them. For. If the instrument makes probable this oral hallucination, you spin the record of your reddened choice. With upright body, you mimic the melody and its blank harmony harmony. You accompany the symphony with a tenor of all tomorrows. While I, lost in the Maze of Mirrors, ask you to tell me again the story.

You say, First. You say, Make. First, make your mouth make a sound. Speak into the mouth-piece and cause the tremors in the thin diaphragm. Then. The steel point makes tracings upon the hard wax. Fix the thing upon a spinning cylinder. And. By means of the tracings, the diaphragm will repeat with perfection your original voice. Or. The echoes in the mountains of your lamentations. As. Cries in a haunted brothel. Or. Whispers in a ghostly tavern. The instrument has spoken in our hearing. Listen. It is a natural outcome of the telephone. Listen. The old man's laugh comes to us as out of a phonograph.

I say, Perfect. I say, Yet. This instrument warbles. And. This record is warped. And. The tongue of this snake. Has scratched this disk. For. Your voice is skipping. And. As I put the conch to my same hear, I listen to the echo of. I listen to the echo of. The raspy susurrations of your adieu.

Applied to a person or thing that exactly reproduces the utterances of another person or thing. Hence, the transitive verb. To report in Pitman’s phonograph. As. It is a great loss to the me that your song was not phonographed and preserved. And. Whether it be so, it is phonographed in the mind of the mindful God. All out of sync.

Periscope

Mankind’s third eye. Or. A system permitting visibility from an invisible position. A combination of a Telescope and a Camera Obscura. And. An apparatus used in a submarine for obtaining a view of objects above the water by a system of mirrors. A similar kind of tube-and-prism apparatus used on land. As in trench warfare. By which. A going to war. The action of carrying on, or engaging in, war. A state of war. And. Military life or service. Always. But. If this third eye can bring to me a second sight, I call myself Commander and put my pupil to this bending lens. I survey the space above the break as if from a conning tower. Try to decipher your position. While you. Aboard the U-Boat of a different horizon. Evade my sight precisely.

The name of a Photographic object-glass. As. A Steinheil's periscope. And. Why the many styles of objectives? Orthoscope. Tachyscope. Euryscope. Periscope.

To peek around in a slanted fashion. To obtain a general comprehensive view. To perceive the panorama. As. When I periscope over this precipice. And. Where fishes' food is fed the shades who periscope through flowers to the sky.

One pipe encased in a protective pipe protruding upward from a submarine. As seen from above the sea, a tiny lighthouse. Or. A small pipe with an elbow joint. As. My ossified unstretched elbow. For. When the peri glides, my arm leaves a V-shaped foamy wake. A mark which betrays my presence. To the look out on your destroyer.