Trembling Arpeggios

Listening to The Guitar and Other Machines by the Durutti Column

Back-Garden Poem

I dream of rain, falling on everything,
the dripping, peeling runnels of all gardens,
from the grey sky through glass and hothouse,
in the sowed order of this elder’s place.
It is clean, mingled with the smell of powders
made to dust this good earth, the exponential
mess of broken rocks from a younger planet
turned to beds for fragile growth,
the shoots of things made easily in days,
the fungi breaking cover in a night.

This is a clean garden, a straightened mess,
grown to show creation lanes and ways,
with plans and spillings, the borders
of the un-wise man to crystal futures.
And outside this corner of the house,
this brick tree to heaven and seeded clouds,
the music is black and blue and loud,
the sound of all rain that hits dry earth
in one ocean’s worth of water,
in one day, one grain of time boiled down.

to nothing, integrated under math and lost
as old knowledge of relationships
we avoided; the sad atoms of humanity
that missed collision and exited to void.
And words ache in all this seriousness,
flown over pain of separation.

This music is so painfully of the past; it brings back half-finshed ideas from ten and more years ago. There is no reason or association that I can define; it may be just some weird confluence of this and some event which I have forgotten, some sunday spent tearing along deserted country roads with nothing better to do and the radio on at full volume. What do we know now?

Tired of this now. Bye.