29 December 2023

Scat singing in war zones

Eight more birds gone extinct in Hawai`i. The scientist who last heard one recorded its voice. Thinking there was another bird, it flew toward him. Duet of one, the `o`o’s “oo’oo oo-auh” song. What to make of a diminished thing gone dead. You can find lists of the poets killed in Gaza, those missing in Ukraine. The recorders leave recordings, and we move toward them, trying to catch their dying songs. “If I must die,” wrote one Palestinian poet; you can read the poem handwritten on white tile in the New York subway. A little boy at Gate E6 carried a small white board with red marker. He made circles on it, then a stick person. A man in purple fedora fell beside me, behind a large bag, then plunked himself in the next seat over. He was wearing a uniform of some sort, I realized, on return from Costa Rica: baggy tan shorts, colorful shirt, beard, wide eyes. By the curb in Hilo, two men with spurred leather boots and clean saddles waited for a ride. Garry Winogrand’s first wife thought she was married to a lens; he never stopped taking pictures. A friend found his grave in a New Jersey Jewish cemetery, where his parents had buried him. When I called Bryant, I heard only his feet hitting the parking lot of Hilo’s Target.

To record is not to save, but also not to lose, is a between-space where the near-present meets the near-past and the melody of a voice weaves through time like a punt returner. When we say “punt,” we mean different things, sound fraying into two metaphorical fields; one might punt one’s profession to go row a flat boat on a shallow river. In Cambridge, my then three year old son held out a twig, pretending to fish. He says one of the knives he’s looking at on-line has a fish scaler. The scale is off, between fake fishing and the rampant insincerity of our age. What does she want us to say about the Civil War? Less a racist than a moral coward, one opponent says of Nikki Haley, though he’s at 1% in the polls. We have her on a recording, saying this thing we keep repeating, as if to rinse it out of our system. Ukrainian poets reject the prosodic systems of Russian poetry, preferring to write unadorned free verse or prose. Where you cannot find beauty, don’t invent it. The poet who disappeared may have no paper now, but he’s writing poems in his head, his friend says. They never collect corpses, so he must be alive. Others disappear beneath waves of rubble in Gaza. The disarchitecture of this time, its broken sounds. An exploded word cannot find itself in a song, no matter how faithfully recorded.