Tuesday, January 29, 2013

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.
 
 
 










Monday, January 28, 2013

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.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

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.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

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.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

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.)

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

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.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

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.

Thursday, January 3, 2013

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?