Moments In Love – The Art Of Noise

As I walk to the railway station, I slip
The buds into my ear and press ‘Play’.
And there, as the Estuary reveals itself,
I am eighteen and back in your house:
You’re back from visiting University
And you’re a Marco Polo to us,
Unpakaging your riches to rubes.
And there it is:
A twelve inch track into another world.
It gleams and is modern and electric,
Its subject, no more than life to be had,
Out there,
Now.
It looped and looped around the room.
Ten minutes stretching out of the old,
Expanding into Experience and ourselves.
No going back. Never, as the man said,
Such Innocence again. Again.
And we heard that it was good
And this Art mattered and was more,
Much more than merely Noise.

Fracture.


The fig is in full fig, last summer
the fruit hung like light bulbs
Bright beacons for the greedy birds.
Summer’s heat was tempered
Within its spreading palms
And beneath its cooling canopy
I sat, leg in plaster, and read;
“Sweet are the uses of adversity.”
A suburban Arden, for me, maybe.

This year it’s taking over
Our paltry postage stamp patch.
I am mobile again and cart a chair
To its green and thought filled shade
And remember Clare crying on finding
His favourite tree cut down.
And like the tuppeny Romantic I am
I think I know how he felt.
But I don’t. But I think I could.