Rough Music


On the exact consolations it took to dispel
the wages of an ordinary life, my friend
Carol-Anne is typically less compelling.
She reaches this time to impress upon me
she's my oldest friend and very few things managed
to hold on to themselves for long in those days.
Scorpions walled in panels round a mug
definitely could have played a part in the way
the year went without a break to watch it fall.
There were already anyway untold attempts
throughout the period, which is what the poem I sent
tries noticing first, to make a grab for the handful
of certainty it could open, underneath the door
in search of its only delight – tamely to rest
at the side of whatever else is going on –
modest and transparent as marbles of light
the second awareness breaks on a result, dully
to end on these shelves above me, richly though
they could still grow if nudged, boundless since they'll
have no choice. Yet there's less to worry about
than what we'll bring along if, the way she reads things,
in one transported welcome it can be heard repeated,
and even when I've come round to her pew for the night,
straightforward as the centre unlocking first thing,
might shadeless overlook the quality of kindness
needed to reveal pitfalls beyond resuming immediately,
and forget as usual to rest against the failure
of it for a while: that way I began all over
again with the only dream he kept in place of
himself ineffectually written out on his own
memorable way to leaving his wife the house and
two sons out cold in the next room on bunk beds
sliding conveniently toward him still I read.

At the rear an illusion's frantic collapse
is capable of joining paragraphs and breath
down rooting finally for the minutes themselves.
Housed in the gasp between 1906 and 1918,
to cite one example, for all that no one was able to
reply as convincingly a second time. What bothered her
was how little the words mattered when there was
always a relative or ethical look-alike who turned up
ready to concede a bunch of them could capture her life
completely. It made as much sense as believing in
a time when the few poems we know about had
sent us back to the fields with the feeling we owed
the week ahead. The sand in the square when
they stood for them must have been unspeakable.

Distinctions like this are merrily abandoned
in front of an invitation to step out for
the parched reveille that sets up more of them resolved
to parade in it daily like dutiful photographs;
over the crush around what matters at a distance
drying isn't a wish won't prevail for the quiet leave
they also packed, those rouged eyefuls on the pavement,
remember, as they headed toward strangers, who won't,
faultless the same as last night, be looked on?
For the season's cockeyed fringe abounds
and at your door you pulled on air dyed green
under green risen with clamorous bellwethered masses
tied down in the close and in the way of
when by your side I'll surely grasp an opening
to say I brought owners and noises together at
the appointed place, but only after finding you
so exactly there. Though later movements gathered
laughter from the rumoured houses where we walked,
returning through them quickly shears straight to
the regret I anticipated at the end of your question
and reminds me of the way we once used words
we thought came registered with the very air surrounding
our enclosed design. I wanted you to come away
belonging to the smell of my auntie's make-up every Sunday
she wore it for church, wouldn't she, absolutely sure and clear
up now we're here why its value has eluded us both.

Got up too righteously in fact and it's a bored wait
at the end of the usual day we long for
at other times, sensible of no extra fee
if we hold for our one accord of the day
to be vouchsafed across each other in the turbulence
of the rest of them reawakened back at home.
Any conditions we met for them will be made up
in some token now they've started out all over
for us, the pinched faces of thoughts with backs
turned on the likelihood it was no more than stuff
we sent on in boxes because we'd paid for the space
and woke determined to fill it, anything ready for
in tomographies we flaked away revealing promises of
destinations they can dream of us caring more about.