Poems by Members - page 3
We've slipped two centuries or three, my dear: this slow domestic lamplit atmosphere calmly reflects Vermeer. For your absorbed renewal in a book, my simple needlework, are quiet and level-headed as his art so homely wrought. I think we'd like retreating to his past with music, milk and maps, and nothing fast; the concentration cast on balancing of scales and weighing pearls, his lucid pregnant girls and vegetable colours, pheasant bright affirming light.
There is often running away running up a seam or debt, running out of steam or time but then there is just running unqualified except for being absorbed in the act itself, bone with muscle, nerve intense, elating in sure-fire kicks down against firm ground, able even, ears flung back, to hurtle headlong, head strong way beneath an electric fence.Back to top
Spring green and summer green are not the same. Driving over Offley Hill in May sunlight after rain, where the wet road swooped to the spread fields, yellow rape was curdling in their blue-green distances. Not yet the solid blocks of brash colour stamping the countryside or tired greens of late June, just newness waiting like a carpet for the heavy tread of long days to scuff the pile, fade the pattern, make it threadbare.
A string broke, parted from the bridge
of his Stradivarius,
just as answering chords of quadruple horns
ricocheted from the gilded loggia.
Tchaikovsky opus 35
interrupted!
The score, a message of black beads on staves,
remained open and ready on the rostrum.
And while we waited for nervous fingers
to restring and retune
in this unexpected interval,
I wondered:
Am I merely programmed,
like the score, with a message -
a genome in triplet time?
Will it instruct my pulse to race
and my skin to stiffen
at the return of the allegro moderato?
Will a few bases in sequence
make me jump to my feet
and join the audience
in a spontaneous roar?