I first practiced those mu-oh-ah sound
chants that we identified with the Tuva
throat singers back in the mid-1980’s
up in big loft studio at Boston Art Center

Where closing exercise after rehearsal
of Mirage Mime Theater we gathered
on the floor (I had made shine painting
it with varathane) & attempt to separate

The overtones from from deep-throat hum
which then when my son and I move down
to lower-slower Delaware I still continued
in the dance studio where we transitioned

And so out in the middle of about 40 acres
of then industrially farmed land and so we
lived in the left over farm house that was in-
fested with termites and eventually fell apart

But it was in remaining days stillness so far
out a shell white drive that I slowly learned
to start regularly producing those overtone
‘N’ and ‘R’ sounds issuing them on their way

Up the throat across the flap of soft palate
through the nasal passages damp separating
overtones one from other until now in the
cathedral perfect music space scales appear

Forty years of attempts and practice and there
they are the ascending and descending tones
echoing within the sanctuary Quincy granite
stone walls reverberating pulsing hard head me.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.