Station Singer

Under Union Square this woman ripped it up with her voice, even if she didn't bust holes in the walls she managed to melt the dry clump of dust I'd become into one of the living. If there are seismographs rigged up anywhere here in NYC to detect motions in the earth's crust the subways must always swing the needles, just as locomotives like this woman's voice would. I wondered what you would call the little things in her voice that mount it to your being like barbs - what are all those little points of impact? You could call them vibrations, but haven't we all heard that word enough? I thought maybe they were seisma, but then I read that seisma is a verb meaning to stand still. There was nothing still about her voice, which flew out of her like a flock of birds startled by a dog. Seisma could only apply to the half circle of immobilized commuters, eh, let's call them transients, stationary as fence posts around her, stilled by whatever it was that happened when the woman opened her mouth and her arms to sing about summer, whatever it was that told us home was with her.

They're not oscilla, small masks swaying under tree limbs during festivals in Ancient Greek times, although they too call to mind the play of waves. Perhaps it's best to say they're pistons that hammer in the furnace of the woman's talent, which doesn't seem to have any brakes.