Soul Chorus

Intro

“Soul Chorus” presents three pairings of photographic image and poetic text that invite the viewer /reader to ponder the interplay of abstracted pictorial colour — predominantly green, yellow and blue —and the energies that animate the lyrical word.

I Never Grow Weary of Gazing at Trees 

I spend entire walks gazing at greens. I have this vague sensation that I lived in them long ago—the way a sentence, as Emerson said, was once an animal. What did he mean? Fish, lizard, bird, beast? Motley? Multicoloured? Sassgoní—in Hebrew. A word I’ve always loved. Because it’s spring, the blooming is resplendent; scents that take your breath. Mock orange, the strongest, reminds me of the poem by Glück. 

I raise my gaze to the tiger’s claw—the Indian coral tree, a parrot with its beak in a brilliant bloom. So focused in that heady red, it doesn’t notice this woman below, her beckoning falsetto. True life is beyond song, she hears herself pipe up, craning a tenuous neck. Then sits on a bench to rest, thinks of her mother, oceans away, the story of the gull that crashed—into a power transformer, causing a bang that rocked the block. How does a gull lose track like that? 

I never grow weary of gazing at trees. The cypresses across the street, the fig and honey locust, the neem. Imaginary scent of fennel, ataraxic as grass. The breeze is playing ball with the dust, a tumbleweed-like motion. My spot on the bench is altered by this, though I remain where I was. Probably I won’t go home without some gift of nature docked in my pocket—a rock, a pod, a strip of bark. If only to let them go. We’re all just passing through here, on our circuits, ex-changing traces. 

First published as “Bloom” in Waterwheel Review, October 2022. 

 Poem for a Temperamental Solstice 

Wind through hickories tickles my neck. 

I let down my hair, it brushes my back. 

The heat’s so hot, I lie here idle, 

shaded by maples— 

                           these pioneer trees. 

              June, is this your worst? 

I sing a riff to summer love, a 

silly song of cows and crows— 

the blackness of the latter 

and their strange occult 

command. I lie, now cool 

and damp from touching 

rock I ponder stone—the age, 

and then an age of what remains 

but heat and cold, perhaps a poem 

or dewy tune—the world’s old lonesome 

                                                               coda. 

Descant 

If we have to supplement our days 

                                                     with metaphysics,

 

let it be distinct enough to dazzle balance 

                                                                          and void. 

Now that our life is half- 

behind, there’s no such thing as forwarding its forces. 

                                                                 No such thing as 

backing into death, or after- 

life: our name for the biggest wish. 

Humour, if it enters there, must come in a double- 

flip. After sun has been revoked, 

night is so Canadian-cold, it glitters.

 

The night soul chorus hums to us—the living still— 

ineffably, as descant to our hope— 

that what is sense-perceptible 

                                                     transcends— 

First published in Contemporary Verse 2, Vol. 34, Issue No. 2, Fall 2022

Photographer: Gun Roze

Text: Elana Wolff