Sound Men In between words, there are silences. My sound man finds them all. He marks them with a pencil to snick them out with his blade. Hour after hour I watch him, paring my interviews into clear speech. Brown silence in various sizes ticks into the wastebasket: a quick breath as long as your finger. a pause you can wrap round your waist. How patiently he corrects each speaker's diction, how gently he teaches the tongue-tied to speak as clear as Demosthenes. Yet I've never known a sound man who didn't cherish a shoebox full of some great man's stutters and slips and a secret plan to splice them together into one long nightmarish stammer, something truly unspeakable. David Weinstock David Weinstock (david.weinstock@gmail.com) believes that twenty years of writing advertising is the best thing that ever happened to his poetry.