FROM THE PLENARY.

First impression faint: blues licks on hot wax.
Where the tradition meets the cornfields; the crossroads in the kitchen.
A sense of meaning haunted the solo but bent it back into the walking bass.
Those Mississippi breezes blew across the Serpentine.
More vibrato. Elgar swam upstream of all this
in the backwaters of the Severn; emptied Malvern's reflection
into the Bristol Channel, composing himself with every stroke.
Fording streams in our dry clothes we are spectators
at the Crucifixion, first hearers of the will, there for our title.
Music to be played on the heart's accord meanders through the Paradise
Garden: its arpeggios disperse us each with fragments of its fullness.
The Lord Lucifer, in attendance, dances off with the harmonics,
steels the thunder.