James Gurley
The Semi-civilized Tree
for Nazim Ozel, Turkish-born musician and visual artist
Nazim strips bark from an old oak.
Overlays the branches with countless
wires he tunes to weird harp-like
scales, tones that call to the hunters,
forest spirits, small-voiced echoes
waiting there in the trees. His hands
seek resonances. Not music
to bring order, congruity to our lives,
not Mozart and Brahms, their
measured signatures. It's these mysteries
celebrated in glades, these ancient rites
testing our ears to hear, bodies
to remember, Nazim finds, the resilience
of wood and string, earth notes,
cry of a jay, wind through pliant boughs.
This Riot Life
Out of the black hole’s deep throat, a bass note.
— CNN Headline
Come dusk the sky turns violet blue
and out for a walk in our neighborhood
we hear a train diesel hum electrical hum
akin to that B-flat note astronomers
discovered in the Perseus cluster
Is it a dead star’s gravity A celestial
imbalance This dissonance scientists
mapped in the heavens while down here
is a racket of bombings and scandals
on radio newscasts? This malaise
this riot life on our walk Moonlight
spillage exposes a raccoon scurrying
across ice-dazzled lawns City adrenaline
hard to shut out with winter’s
arsenal of storms approaching off shore
We hear that hum Our shoes rustling
fallen leaves A static of pulsars
in that camouflaged raccoon
upending garbage cans In closed
parks For-rent signs Old cardboard
shelters Those weedy empty lots
Lowest pitch of our discordant universe
This black-hole acoustics darkening
our streets This disquiet we can’t help
but carry with us back home
James Gurley's first book of poems, Human Cartography, won the T. S. Eliot Prize and was published by Truman State University Press. His work has appeared most recently in Crab Orchard Review, Unsplendid, and Verse Wisconsin. The poems included here are from a recently completed manuscript titled Organic Radio. |
Comments
|