ECHOES OF SUN

David King's latest post presents a very fine work which is also a celebration of vinyl records that.. yes, haven't really ever disappeared from the market. But the time when you could listen to music ONLY through vinyl records and tapes and the radio and the television ..only!!, that time has disappeared. It started disappearing in the late eighties. By the middle nineties it was definitively gone.
I consider "that time" almost as another life: public telephones on the street had a "meaning" for example, I remembered a lot phone numbers, most forgotten and useless now, I had naturally learnt them off by heart, I didn't feel lost and desolate without that perpetual tapping on a perpetual screen perpetually ready in my pocket containing almost "a whole life" in it and producing a perpetual shivering and contracting of my eyebrows...and, by the way the words, "browser" or even worse "server" didn't exist.  "Server" being almost ridiculous...the verb "serve" that implies passiveness has become mysterious and active, permeating and governing lives!
The simple truth is that we were governed by less... depended on less, not on the pressing, buzzing, swarming, and maybe only apparently easygoing wholeness of this day and age...

ECHOES OF SUN

You raised the turntable lid,

took the record out of the inside cover,

kept it by its sides, with both hands,

with only the least of it between palms and forefingers’ tips,

gazed at its shine with a frown and a smile

and blew slightly on the surface, first one side

then the other, turning it with a nimble

imperceptible swirl in your wrist, like a dance step

you wanted to hint at.

You laid it on the turntable, slowly, and more slowly

lowered the turntable arm that set it off, stylus landing

on the black, glittering pool of thin furrows

with a wader’s foot’s touch.

We relished the instants of buzzing and crackling

like the first flames of a camp fire

then the rock guitar solo burst in and took off,

God’s grass in its roar.

Yes, it’s through this too that we could assess

longing and stamina in our countenances,

exchanging a few nods while listening was enough,

waving an exulting fist, feet tapping the floor,

the future a raw, puzzling star

while we pretended to be strong

with our gaze on tiptoe.

Constant rites, a longer time.

In echoes of sun.

Moulding the map where we now stand.

 

 

 

BREWING

The remains of destiny’s marrow

at the table of silence.

Filled by famous mermaids

from the memories’ waves.

Time passes

in elementary aloneness

but who cares?

For the moment I endure

though always caught unawares

in the basic music of digression.:

the word “brew”a heavy progression

from “dew”,yes in the beginning it was

morning pure, a splendid lure…

then it sank into its broth,

it had to compromise with its own froth

and it grew and grew.

So we must brew

through whatever we are

cheered and checked by many a star.

While sighing back into the lost former dew,

in a bright drunkenness sometimes

in the wake of the stars’ thrashing miles.

SIPPING

Sip by sip
life drips on.
The glass of wine
that needs be
refilled.
While the piano
plays its tumbling
diamonds.
It rains outside,
rain,

time’s shafts

and the roar
of life’s  lines.
In front, a pageant

of window-panes.
Panes, pains.
In the end it seems
all we can do
is gaze.
Vast rain

on the world’s strand.

What’s more

to understand?
Play, dear piano, play.

http://issuu.com/lapwingpoetry/docs/trame_9781909252240_issuu

Make It Last

READING ME

You would have enjoyed this new book,

you loved the novelist,

her marvellous care for details,

her scrupulous meandering

in all our nooks and crannies

with the vast breeze of her shores.

 

In the silence, the words I read

are loud inside me,

the story enfolds and flows, you know

I myself am a story too, this story,

what else for you would I be?

For you who are in the air I breathe.

My fingers leaf page after page,

in the silence of the words

you are reading me.

Edimburgh

Where I was for Hogmanay.
Rocks, brown rich bricks and wind.
The dazzling hand of the wind.
(And just round the corner Waterstones'.
Where I found two astounding poetry collections:
The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie
and Bees by Carol Ann Duffy.

And a great novel I am now reading: Merivel by Rose Tremain.

And HMW where I found the last two series of Last of The Summer Wine.)

THINGS GO

 

All sorts,

dregs flushed into air,

the stare of stares

that scatters and absorbs.

All sorts, choose some,

pens, keys, socks…socks,

often one of the pair goes first

leaving the other inert,

another puzzle at hand

in the meaningless universe.

And forks, knives, napkins, cups,

the saucers stay a little longer

in questioning rotundity.

And books and magazines and papers,

papers are the quickest

because they can find chinks

in the myriads of folds of the world

and vanish in a swish.

 

All sorts,

dot after dot.

And the mind, the mind.

Frayed wires in a jumble

trying, in their decline,

to arrange a sense

but giving up sooner or later,

gazing only at the boat

in the current’s arabesques,

oars abandoned.

 

We often leave

before leaving,

when we stop caring

about keys

and close ourselves

in or out.

 

Or get flushed and lost in words

as in echoes of swords

until we forget both them and us.

We just might utter a truth,

or so we reckon,

some seconds before,

in a lion’s roar.

 

Dot after dot.

How wide the sky.

GASH

 

I indulge in it,

or it indulges in me since

in the silence everything becomes

a bright blend, a lapse where you forget

the stake that distinguishes this from that.

It is like teeth, the grit that I perceive

at night before falling asleep, teeth

cutting into the dark.

They glitter, flash, lash into

the retina of the night.

It can’t be but salt in the end or

its own ghost in a metaphor,

salt that makes Venetian plasters

sooner or later crumble, they paint

and repaint the walls but underneath

the bubbles grow back and transpire,

damp salt mushrooming in its mire.

Or as when my shoes are constrained

to puddle their way onward in the rain,

on a bank of a canal in the dark where

sudden black pools are revealed

in the glimmering arrows of the lamps.

When in the next morning light

on the leather of the damp shoes

a waving line of salt

in its curlicue of froth, mushrooms.

Or the sweat of silence in deep summer

that stings, shines and consumes.

 

That keeps me awake and eventually

accompanies me into sleep.

Sea of a gristle.

Gnawing rhyme.

Life if you like.

The gash we sink in.

MAGICKING

 

But..who has really ever managed doing that?

A friend told me that a fried told me that a friend told me...

Tell you what,

it’s a matter of

“believe it or not”.

Moments just happen

in which you believe you can do anything,

in which believing is being.

Full, full stop,

believe it or not.

What you believe in then-and that’s life-

is ready to promise you, if you disregard it,

a terrible strife.

It’s its right and no matter how preposterous

it might be,

you cannot ignore it.

Just a powerful illusion this believing, no more?

But what’s more illusion than life and what for?