June 12, 2012

Ah, the cicadas, must have started before dawn this morning, the temperature never got below 80 and they were the first thing I heard when I woke up, lying in the dark, the continuous chorus of the cicadas, its own jungle sounding rhythm one we can't fall into but often hear without hearing through the heat of the summer.  The birds are quieter this morning but I see the gulls and terns at the edge of the trees, circling at a distance their cries lost, just silent arcs of gray and white and black tilting in the bit of breeze there is this morning.  Again the sky is hazy white, no blue, covered with enough moisture to erase all color.  The cat is travelling the yard, quietly stalking shadows, creeping up on the cane, paying no attention to the birds overhead travelling their own airy highways to other yards.

Okay, some mornings in going through books or websites for the poem, one strikes home right away.  This morning it is the poem from Verse Daily, it made me smile in recollection:

Oracle 
       
I believe in a future
when the tuba is what the cool
kids play and sounds not like

the fart of UPS trucks in this
dumb town, not like the loser's
last life moan, but like fog rising

up castle walls would sound
if such things were allowed
to bellow This world

will fall, its flaming guitars
marched to their graves.
The ditches full of tiny phones.

Mark Neely
 
Mikayla played the tuba every year in high school.  The other players were all guys, crazy guys it seemed, ones who shaved their heads for homecoming and wanted her to do the same . . . yeah, right!  Most of the time they played the ompahs, the notes that were the background for flashy trumpets and trombones.  Every year at Christmas we went downtown so she could participate in Tuba Christmas, where every instrument was a tuba or a euphonium, and they played the melody of Christmas songs and carols.  The tuba can make some hellish noises and very loudly when someone is first learning to play, and after that it's a lot of loud repetition of the notes that make up the underpinning of flashier instruments.   I can see someone wanting a future where the cool kids all play the tuba, and, I got so I rather liked hearing it, there is something really primal about it, something fundamental, and it can make notes that vibrate your chest, as well as the walls of your house.  At school, mostly I get the girls with violin cases, or flutes, or clarinets.  I would like it if some morning while teaching I tripped over a tuba case, or a euphonium, or a bass.  Seems the girls tend to stick to the smaller more delicate instruments.  I admired Mikayla for choosing the tuba, for wanting to play something that would be loud and brass!   Perhaps the poet wants us to have more live, fundamental music, played in connection with other musicians, rather than tiny phones, but I think there is probably room in our future for both things, phones and music both keep us connected in ways that are individual and unique.   The tuba is as necessary to the band as the flute or the trumpet, all part of the balance.  And those tiny phones that do so much now, especially for young people, keep them in touch with even old fogey parents, and all are part of that balance leaning toward a future no one knows.