Written and read by Mónica de la Torre. Sound by Hans Tammen
If a tree is a fact, is a copse a fact too?
A fact: chakras reluctant to open.
As Lucía said, you get
here, your channels close up.
You get there, they open up.
To enter you must go through the copse.
Abracadabra. Corpse, cadaver,
ábrete sésamo. Open sesame, remove
the stubborn this or that, the language constraining
the glottis. Instead, shoot up from the crotch.
Zangoloteo mínimo, eléctrico.
Rattle the bifurcated trunk.
Not the scorch but the stream.
As per folk etymologies: Abracadabra.
“I will create as I speak.”
Conscious as self as ever displayed, splayed open,
ábrete sésamo. An invocation.
A surface folding itself into a mouth.
Déjame hablar, aunque nadie me entienda.
Misunderstood because I’m neither verby nor nouny.
When you speak through scents, pheromones, toxins
and electrical signals only, the arc is harder to follow.
They think I’m out for myself only.
“Vainas de ajonjolí que sólo con rozarse
explotan y se abren.”
For the mystic speaking a lingua ignota, viriditas,
the greenness of the natural world, is divine life’s
moisture, its sudor or sap.
GALINZIA
the word for plane trees
London Plane Tree
Written and read by Mónica de la Torre. Sound by Hans Tammen
What empty chatter must they overhear
in the polluted habitats for which they’re naturals.
The person on the nearby park bench
utters “Nicaragua”as if she wanted all to hear
her crisp Spanish pronunciation.
“Why do I… Why do my taxes
have to cover someone else’s artificial insemination?”
“Why isn’t it letting me go back?”
“There’s an imbalance in your body, you have to figure it out. Are you looking at your phone too much before you go to bed?”
I came here to gauge whether Moses’s
predilection for the London plane tree is justifiable
to the casual eye. I concur with him and also Jane:
“hardy, tough, lovely dappled shade…”.
Unlike the silence of effigies, trees’ silence
refuses to take sides in history’s disputes.
Trunks and outspread branches caught mid-
motion in the process of letting the light in,
about to surpass their own reach as you look.
Specimens of all ages recently spotted
standing outside my building (shopping bag snagged on a branch)
flanking the landmarked street on the way to the neighborhood park
enclosing the Theodore Roosevelt Park outside the Museum of Natural History
delimiting Bryant Park, Central Park, the United Nations, and Governors Island’s quadrants where they constitute 54% of the island’s total leaf cover yet
“No two trees are exactly similar as I write this.”
Exfoliating “cream, olive, light brown bark” blending with limestone
and brownstone and sandstone and brick and turning streets
into mirages. Into cinema. “Noble habit.”
Leaves pointing every which way, bending the light,
giving it volume, suffusing the frame with a choreographic
spontaneity and splendor that makes up for the severity
of the grid. Camo hiding its mechanisms.
Mónica de la Torre and Hans Tammen’s collaboration, Arboretum, was produced during a 2023 New Works Artists Residency at Harvestworks. A series of poems written by de la Torre, inspired by some of the trees of Governors Island, were in turn processed and spatialized by Tammen. De la Torre considered the botanical and historical specificities of species of the island’s trees.
(2024) Mónica de la Torre, Hans Tammen