--after the sound installation by Seattle Composer Trimpin--
Five fiery columns encircle the gallery. Change hue
built of Thomas Buckner's recorded baritone,
in shimmering Pyrex--these yellow and white scales--
and rings the gallery with chance harmonies.
Behind us huge tin cans, heated by fire,
It's Trimpin's sleight of hand; the flames,
some engineer's riddle solved: fire, water, and air--
Trimpin creates with this jubilation of trash parts.
Somewhere in Trimpin's program notes is the understory,
beside a bonfire in the Black Forest, each boy
holds a hazelnut into the fire until it glows--
rocketing upward, spinning over the valley.
The bonfire's green wood crackles like steam
Their voices measuring out light. Winter dark,
of the bonfire, metaphysics of childhood wonder
in Buckner's disembodied song, luster and heat
libretto. The eye, ear tricked by aluminum plates,
such natural sounds--as in the blackness
the blaze once seemed to Trimpin a choir, the boys'
these unlikely filaments, the gas flames
as this aria built of imagination and surplus metal,
wobbles at first. The gas flames enclosed
bend and flicker when music, his voice flares,
pop randomly as the air inside them expands.
made music, thermodynamics, the light and sound
his childhood tale of the mid-winter Carnival week
then slams it against a log, the starry embers
whistles. Hazelnuts sparking, river-song, tree shadow.
winter cold dispelled. Trimpin costumes that lure
coloring each tarnished copper tube, this swirling
brass couplings, metal filings, tangles of wire--
shouts of mischief in his mechanical tribute,
lifting up through once cast off bits & pieces.