Rhythm
& Genes
Quoted from, “Keep that Candle Burning
Bright & Other Poems" by Bronwen Wallace
Contributed by: Anne Chiareli
The
Dedication (an excerpt)
…These poems are for Emmylou Harris, to say thanks for the
songs, for how they sing of hot summer nights on the highway and
wine and falling in love and Jesus and the light someone puts in
the window to guide you home.
They are homely like that and corny and clichéd. And necessary, yes, as my love for that kid who still embarrasses me, angers, hurts, the kid who fails.
They burn from what is strong in me, as each of us, in our best moments, tries to love the noisy, untidy selves we’ve lost, out there somewhere.
That’s what I hope, anyway. That she’ll know. Know it’s me who’s calling. My voice like a candle in the night, bringing her in…
Rhythm and Genes (an excerpt)
We all hear - though we may not be conscious of - the beat that
thrums through every human conversation. Rhythmic synchrony it's
called, our sync sense, which, like the other five, conducts us
through the worlds we make of each other, or in this case, sets
us dancing in each other's stops and starts, digressions, turns
and leaps of thought, hyperbole, lies, warnings, lovers' cries -
we move to music, and the scientists who study this sort of thing
(sociolinguistic microanalysts they call themselves) can clock the
tempo with a metronome, and score it, too, each eighth note, triplet,
rest and syncopation measured as a waltz or a square-dance. The
word's melody and the body's, too: the eyebrows going up or down,
the chin's jut, fingers' flex, hands in the air and shoulders coming
in on the shrug - it's all there and what's more, they say, it's
vital to what we listen to, or how. Why, some of them would even
claim we learned it way back when, mastodons, say, and needing to
know how to throw our spears in unison, on the beat, or hear the
cry, clearing its way through all the other cries, that warned us
our young were in danger. Such music's all around us, seeded by
our mothers' heartbeats, dreamy and persistent as those water-memories
we know we have, of being born. It keeps us constantly in auditory
touch: in less than 14 milliseconds thoughts in my head translate
to muscular movements in my throat and mouth, to airways by which
your eardrum oscillates in absolute synchrony with my voice. So
you can see how easily the whole thing flies apart if we listen
only to the meaning of the words. Most microanalysts would say that
we could end lovers' quarrels, racial conflicts, even the possibility
of nuclear war, right now, today, if we'd just go with the music,
which is everywhere and everything, the pulse of the atom, the singing
of the spheres...
Box 1010, Kingston, ON, Canada, K7L 4X8
Hot Line Phone (613) 530-4205,
E-mail: Open Voices