A request for quiet is a humble thing to build a poem on, but Benjamin Krause makes it a small comedy of manners. The speaker addresses a "Friend" in the politest possible voice, then gradually reveals that he has been kept awake by the friend's lover. The poem is about noise, but its real subject is the difference between sounds we choose and sounds we are forced to endure. Everything depends on whether the listener has any say in the matter.
The first stanza is a lover's catalogue, only the love is for the night itself. It runs as one long, unhurried sentence, and its list grows steadily louder. First come the "ongoing opera of the crickets" and the owl's "one-note sonata", where the musical vocabulary turns insects and birds into performers. Then comes the lake, whose waves have a "furious / but curiously calming encroachment and retreat". The line break after "furious" makes the reader hear the violence before the calm arrives. "Encroachment and retreat" sounds almost military, as if the water were a small, polite army. Finally the list tips into rowdiness: "a thousand wild adolescents at Nelson Ledges, / shouting all night like lemurs". The simile is funny, and so is the cool, scientific explanation that follows: their "brains too stuffed with serotonin to sleep." The speaker handles human chaos with the amused detachment of a naturalist watching animals. By the end of the stanza he has shown himself to be tolerant, even generous. A thousand screaming teenagers do not trouble him.
That generosity is the trap the second stanza springs. "But" turns the poem, and the euphemism "the noises your lover makes with you" is delicately indirect. The speaker never names what is happening, yet the sounds are the opposite of vague. In the first stanza the sounds are described lovingly and at a distance. Here they are "piercing moans" that "nearly perforate my eardrum", and that clinical verb makes the moans sound like a medical hazard rather than a pleasure. The comedy comes from this clash of registers: the lyrical "opera" and "sonata" give way to the vocabulary of puncture wounds.
The time scheme is the sharpest detail. The speaker moves from "noon in the middle of summer" to "midnight, then one-ten, two-thirty, three-fifteen and four." The rounded, general times suddenly become exact, and the exactness has a funny and slightly desperate ring. Someone has been checking the clock again and again. The list of times works like the nature list, but now each item adds to the grievance instead of the delight. The poem's structure mirrors itself, too, since both stanzas run to nine lines and both build a catalogue. That symmetry makes the contrast pointed. It is the same speaker, the same night, and the same listening ear, but the verdict has changed.
Nothing here rhymes, and the free verse suits the speaker's easy, conversational manner, as if he were talking to the friend over a drink. The long, spilling sentences let him sound reasonable while he builds his case. The politeness continues to the end. He asks to be told "the next time she will be staying" and promises he will "gladly / run off to Lake Erie for the night." That "gladly" is the poem's driest joke, since it is plainly not glad at all. The last lines also complete a circle. He would rather "take / my chances with the lemurs at the Ledges", so the howling teenagers from the first stanza become the lesser evil. The place names are specific and real, and they ground the speaker's escape routes in an actual landscape.
The poem is worth reading because it is funny while remaining quietly truthful about tolerance. We tend to love noise that asks nothing of us, whether crickets, waves, or distant strangers. Noise that comes from the people we know, in a space we share, is harder to forgive. The title's pun helps here. A "sound request" is both a reasonable one and a request about sound, and the poem shows that a perfectly reasonable request can still be hilariously desperate.