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Four poems Poetry |
Thompson & Thompson
The stenographer’s touch-typing
has me in thrall. The case
is the case in point
but her Remington is all.
She pouts, she doesn’t drop
a stitch and I am aghast
to realise, so late in the day,
that the Thompson
who gave her the low-down
on shorthand and what’s written
on the body, was the Thompson
who tapped out bullet points
for his other Remington -
the Chicago typewriter.
Still Man
The sum of what I see or believe
is simply the case, or mostly true,
and if the limits of my experience
set bounds on the way the world is,
at least for me, no doubt rivers
will soldier on even as I sleep
and fail to keep vigil at their bridges.
The truth that I am wreathed in error
allows me to retreat through the fallacy
of laws in language and broach the matter
that I am here, composing the compass
of worth, while remaining the god
of my own importance, often listless
often singing out like Chanticleer.
That Note
Like Miles Davis’ dark Arkansas roads
the tone I was after lay listless and dreaming
as we rode the sea lanes deep in Dublin Sound.
On either side of the waters we were crossing
lay cable, freight line, pipes of city joy,
and barely visible, though gleaming and new,
an audible pitch of beads and corded wire -
weird acoustics slumbering in their alloy.
And I knew it was there, like the shudder
in a mass light years away shows
the hidden path of a polished ball of ice,
come this way with its heart on fire.
And that solder, that rich conspiracy of brass
and copper, a flame in the blood unlike
the one art melancholy of a polder grove,
or the straight on certainty of a 30’s autobahn,
so it feels like time itself or a bolt
from its legions has come to this span we inhabit
to count on and improvise, that note.
The Silent Brother
Here I am - come closer -
a charcoal figure etched in straw,
surrounded by every blessed thing
and, if you will, nursing the trivial
comings and goings as data
that will never amount to anything.
My handkerchief is blood-flecked,
I throw my whistle to the crowd,
I am down to one key.
And if company bids welcome
and the spirit withdraws,
what shrinks away is that riddle
of diminishing light, the intrigue
from back street welding yards
and the honeyed winter heat,
a fleece within fleece
for the sake of a circus of sparks.
But I know,
like a seed stitched in a
Dutch merchant’s wallet
awaiting its bead of dye,
all music lies adjacent
to music, and I can live forever
on the notes of a Kyrie Eleison.