Poem: Horn Threnody 3.11 (feat. Toshinori Kondo)

 

Here is the print text for an audio-poem I have made, which I'll be premiering today on The Words & Music Show from Montreal. It's a reflection, for me, on distant witness and a meditation on global responsibility. The recording uses some electric trumpet lines from Toshinori Kondo, offered by his family license-free through Bandcamp, over--or under--which I have layered some of my own muted pocket trumpet textures. My own recording is available free of charge on Bandcamp, although any payment I receive for downloads will be matched by me and donated to local food banks here in Vancouver. Toshinori Kondo passed away--transitioned--at the age of 71 on October 17, 2020, so this piece is also an elegy for him, offered with deep respect for his life and art. The audio from which I have borrowed is Mr. Kondo's posthumously-released recording called "Blow for 3.11." 

Horn Threnody 3.11 (feat. Toshinori Kondo)

 

Ce ton qui nous colle aux oreilles, la vision de la catastrophe collée sur la rétine, se superposent à d'autres que nous avons connus depuis l'enfance, et il faut vivre avec cette vision de notre futur possible, à jamais gravée sur la rétine, qui hélas surgit parfois distinctement devant nos yeux. 

—Ryoku Sekiguchi, Ce n’est pas un hasard. 

 

No form of lament seems massive enough:

tectonic peal, 

the supersaturated keen

of jacked electric brass wet with effects,                       

like denatured gull screech, like seismic shriek,

woebegone siren wail; a frazzled taps;

atrocious, injured blare—irradiant, cranked.

Lachrymal squelch beaches itself in slabs.

Come ten years back, one bad March afternoon

saw Tōhoku swallow 

its own live east coast whole,

tongue to pelagic tail, entire shorelines 

sucker-punched by a sudden obese surge,

the trench-deep pitch and heave made by a wall 

of blunt ocean murk walloping landfall;

crude, big seabed upchuck; catastrophic, 

 

headlong saltwater slap, pulverizing

harbours, houses, and power-plants 

in the hard churn

of its remorseless, whelming gut. Take out 

your mute. Retaliate with what small dose 

of spitty empathy your human mouth

can muster. The word tsunami blisters

your lip like leakage from unquenched fuel rods.

25.05.20

25.05.20

Listen can’t breathe. Listen what voice whose voice can’t breathe. Listen what broke what voice who says listen can’t breathe. Listen cop knee to neck what broke can’t breathe. Listen what hope can’t breathe. Listen whose neck whose voice what broke can’t breathe. Listen cop knee to neck speak up can’t breathe can’t speak shut up listen shut up. Listen what broke whose voice cop knee to neck don’t choke who says can’t breathe speak up. Listen shut up what hope don’t speak don’t choke whose voice cop knee to neck what broke can’t breathe what voice listen. Listen speak up what hope who says. Listen can’t breathe.  Listen.

Constable (poem)

I’m using this blog to self-publish a few poems from home, most of them elegies and other public pieces that have emerged in the recent months. “Constable” is an elegy respectfully dedicated to RCMP Const. Heidi Stevenson, who was murdered in Nova Scotia a week and a half ago. It’s intended to offer sincere condolences. I grew up in Truro, Nova Scotia, and still have friends there.

Constable

Heidi Stevenson, 1971-2020

Maintiens le droit.

You’re told, hold to what’s right, no matter what,

which if taken to heart you take to mean,

first off, you’re the one called to look out for  

the wounded, the bewildered, and the shunned.

Service inscribes its craft across the law.

There’s anybody could be your neighbour:

common decency forms the better part

of what ought to pass for justice. You swore

to temper fear, favour, and affection,

but maybe not at the cost of close-grained

kindness. From the folks you stand on guard for

you learn what real care costs. Come the last shift

on your current patch, for instance, a good

ways north of Cole Harbour up the 102,

you might pull your cruiser to the shoulder

to think through how your oath might get you killed,

how kids and husband, left to reconcile

duty to loss, might persevere, and how

no place else comes remotely close to home.

Mount Everest Deaths (Poem)

I have been reading about the death-toll on Mount Everest, and seen the photograph (in The Guardian, here and here) of the current human traffic jam at the summit, trying to push upward, sometimes stepping over the bodies of other dead climbers. This piece, this poem, emerged for me as a commentary on the news, and of thinking about the inhuman and about certain forms of eco-tourism and terrible sublimity emerging in the accelerated epoch now named the Anthropocene. A hybrid sonnet came out, in fives and sixes. I want to put it up on this blog because of the immediacy and the temporality of its subject matter. It was composed and edited over about three days.

Tourist Climbers, Mount Everest, Nepal Side, Late May 2019 

(See the Photograph by Nirmal Purja)

Triumphantly inadequate: out of ten-plus

amateurs, permits intact, who’d expire 

in a crammed mass ascent through the kill zone this week, 

most, chuffed with so much third-hand hubris, got 

sucker-punched by the hypoxic sublime. Sure, sure,

a blue-balling few summited, but only

to crumple along the first leg of the slog down.

         (People stepped over them, stiffened. A line 

of down-filled anoraks snaked its impacted track

         up the crown ridge, strewn with used O₂ tanks,

marking a slow-witted hokey-pokey topward.

You choose to bend and help, you don’t make it.)

No cliff jockey returns from this fierce place unscarred,

having clomped past the air’s inhuman edge.

Song for Song For (Elegy for Joseph Jarman, 1937-2019)

I'm a good few weeks late with this, which was written soon after Joseph Jarman's passing in early January.  I haven't been keeping up with the blogging for at least a year now; things should change soon. In any case, this is for Joseph Jarman out of deep respect for what I believe his music and his poetry have taught me. And how his work has taught me more about how to listen.

Song for Song For

(Joseph Jarman, 1937-2019)

whoever heard about a better way to dance, then did;

whoever sensed life soon enough gets over with itself;

whoever got called to call out hardline America;

whoever learned to ghost-finger an alto’s sacred glyph,

a baritone’s raw mark-up language, a tenor’s thick throat;

whoever showed righteous moxy in situations when

righteous moxy was not exactly needed; whoever 

testified to the unkempt scurf of little instruments;

whoever understood the fraught, feral imperatives

of compassion; whomever good gumption never let go;

whoever decided on fiercely striated face paint

most gigs, most nights; whoever chased “uncharted microtones”;

whoever caught nothing shy of the heft of complete light; 

whoever said, “I seek new sounds / because new sounds / seek 

                                                                                                     me.”

Some Musics, for Ken Pickering (poem)

Here is a brief elegy for Ken Pickering, who passed away yesterday and will be sorely missed.

Some Musics

for Ken Pickering

Some musics draw you in and pull you near.

Some musics sound what words fall short about.

Some musics free you up enough to hear

what offers a brief means of letting go.

Some musics can’t be bought again, even

by special order at Black Swan Records.

Some musics refuse the done, the given.

Some musics have a way of happening

that defies and embraces love at once.

Some musics winnow a few greasy vowels

down to their consequential resonance.

Some musics make life a bit more worthwhile. 

Some musics have little to do with notes.

Some musics improvise what can’t be said.

Some musics stir what grieves and celebrates.

Some musics keep good company in loss.

Elegy for Aylan Kurdi, Galip Kurdi, Rehan Kurdi (poem)

2 September 2015

Most of us saw those photographs.

Washed up small sneakers first, face down

in the blunt sand, forehead lapped

by the torpid, receding surf,

a drowned three-year-old slumps against

the gritty diminishing edge

of one flotsam-caked Turkish beach,

one among others. Waterlogged,

red t-shirt and blue shorts cling

to his numb frame. Officially

compassionate, a policeman

puts on a pair of latex gloves

and grimly lifts the child’s slack form

away. Somewhere along the strand,

his drowned mother and brother wait

their turns. There can be no refuge,

no coming home, no going back

for them now that a capsized world

sees fit to care. Who can gather

their overwhelming remainder

into our staid human embrace?