Nathaniel S. Rounds begins with a small act of violence against music. "Old Iron Toes" is "giving the ivories a beating," and the poem piles up the damage: a "big, bad foot," a pink kerchief soaked with sweat, a "power hammer in an infant's nursery." The best joke is "Chopping Chopin on the butcher's block," where the sound of the composer's name invites the pun. Chopin's nocturne is meant to be delicate, so brute force here is both funny and a little painful. The pianist is all noise and no listening.
Then the poem turns on a gentle gesture. A little girl named Natalia "taps" him and "suggests he take a breather." Nothing in the verbs is aggressive, yet his "welcomed and long-overdue departure" is the poem's first victory, and the nocturne resumes "with sparkling facility." Quiet persuasion beats loud force. The title, "Silence, Like a Poultice," points the same way. A poultice is a soothing dressing laid on a wound, and silence is treated as a remedy for what the hammering piano has bruised.
The setting is a tenement lobby "where the rats and collection agents / find easy spoil." Rounds then introduces his real subject by borrowing an old proverb, "Necessity never made a good bargain," and bending it. Necessity becomes a woman who "makes great banana waffles / with fresh strawberries and whipped cream." The scrap of domestic comfort matters because hardship is usually imagined as bare. Her eighth-floor flat is "a curiosity shop" of snake bite serums, dried seahorses, a Gutenberg Bible and Kerouac's letters. It holds survival gear and cultural treasure side by side, which suggests that need breeds resourcefulness and imagination rather than only lack. Under the kitchen counter sits a pirate radio station, and the poem lets itself become a fable.
The strangest image in that fable is the broadcast. Two neighbor children, Loruhamah and Loammi, sit at a marble table building villages on a board game, "saying nothing, the silence broadcast / and appreciated on both sides of the Atlantic." Their names come from the biblical book of Hosea, where they carry meanings like "not pitied" and "not my people." Rounds gives these labelled, unwanted children a world to build and an audience across an ocean. Their silence is not emptiness but a kind of concentration, and it is the opposite of Old Iron Toes's racket. The occasional "hammering of an unfortunate piano" seven floors below only shows how far apart the two worlds are.
The last movement brings Necessity out of her flat. She is "the generous, cross-eyed beauty," an odd and affectionate phrase that refuses glamour. She crosses the hallway in a "flax, pintuck dress," carrying "a wasp nest on a torn branch," a domestic outfit paired with a threat. In the elevator she meets the rat and the collection agent, and her mere presence "scar[es] them into silence." The word returns once more, now as something imposed on the predators. By the basement they have become "models of self abnegation" and "wave shyly with their straw boaters." The comedy lies in the pests acquiring good manners and period hats, as if the vermin and the bill collector had been caught out and made polite. She leaves "in a blaze of thunder," and her exit has the grandeur of a minor goddess.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady meter. Lines run from a few words to full sentences, and some stanzas are single lines, which gives the piece the feel of a story told aloud. Its music comes from sound play ("Chopping Chopin," "banana waffles," "bathroom breaks") and from sharp shifts of tone, from slapstick to tenderness to myth. A few odd typographical slips, such as "Tf" for "If," are best treated as rough edges of the text we have.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal of pity. It looks at a poor building full of rats and debt and finds there a household that is inventive, well read and quietly powerful. Necessity, usually a grim word, becomes the figure who feeds children and frightens off the people who prey on the poor.