Poem: Subduction Zone

I wrote this poem to accompany a painting by A. Shah; both were displayed in the Double Take: Art & Literature Side by Side exhibition at the Bankhead Gallery in Livermore, California in March 2022.

Subduction Zone

When we drop the needle
on the new Charlie Palmieri record,
the signature Antillean rhythm
and montuno motif is alchemy of the highest magic,
even on this mid-seventies release
after everyone’s gone fusion jazz.

Genius, you call it; revelatory arrangements
and percussive intelligence
weave a singular ecosystem,
build a world of motivated rhythm,
fervent, sonic layers adapted to pressures
in the darkest layers of the oceans
where even bones dissolve,

where a palette knife barely reaches,
no bathyscaphe can descend.
Active elements smolder
in this place, this Mariana
Trench of sound and inky water,
a world that bubbles erratically
and profoundly like ourselves,

the most human of humans.
Heated ductile layers roil
just beneath rigid
uppermost crusts, oceanic
and continental. We sense
that particular heat
and I know I needn’t question

what you say about genius:
there's freedom in receiving
this conclusion without argument.
Isn’t it enough
that an oceanic lithosphere
is constantly recycling
into Earth’s mantle?

Come whatever tsunami may,
pure subduction sings in the lightless depths–
I am crumpling against the sound
one oceanic plate makes sliding beneath another,
as the motion seeds future chains
of little volcanoes in this music
and elsewhere.