TWO POEMS
ANGELA ARNOLD
POEM I
MODERN CLASSICAL
That music. It could just fall on flat ears.
Or have fingers jigging drunkenly, have hands dancing
to sounds unheard – except in your head:
in a space (hard to specify)
that's a bare and silent and more than music room (of sorts).
One that isn't often walked in, mindfully,
respectfully – respect for the normally unheard, that is.
Some species of washboard sound.
Squeaks from a cello and thrums
from a different part of piano. Tippytaps even
that sound like something issuing from... a tap, or from
mice (quite without irony). Imagine that. Play with that.
Stay with that. The squawks.
Sounds that, now that they have
had their crucial melody supplied
from within,
are illumined, readable, bearable even.
There they are: there, and there, truly
any place you care to turn.
All waiting for a chance
to chime,
to complete,
to totally destroy
the desire to hear,
to see, to presume, the predictable.
POEM II
FINDING SOMETHING ELSE TOGETHER
So your poet/artist/insert-idler-of-choice has a bone-lazy moment
to think: things, art and that.
Beauty, even – OK, not like that.
All species of stuff could lie tastefully wrecked, overgrown, neatly
blemished. Rust, plenty of scope in that. Doing beauty, even? Mute
embrace? Blood-rushing race to help,
grandly save?
Even just a plainsong of a life, shouldering pain artfully.
And always there's the pure animal grace
of movement as such:
the pregnant curve of the high-kicking bound
(think about it) to kill – the fierce face,
the big roar mouth
(what else would it need?), eyes lighting up at the scream that
trumpets: victim!
And here comes the curve ball, crunch thought:
soldiers – beauty – bullet that pops into its target so flawlessly
fiercely, mid-chest, exactly so...do their eyes widen, their heart
leap to its feet
with the sheer perfection of that?
Beauty, art, definitions (bet you wish now you hadn't). As if
there was anything at all guaranteed
to be light, purely.
Something like the damn cherries of life that you'd pick out,
given the option.
MODERN CLASSICAL
That music. It could just fall on flat ears.
Or have fingers jigging drunkenly, have hands dancing
to sounds unheard – except in your head:
in a space (hard to specify)
that's a bare and silent and more than music room (of sorts).
One that isn't often walked in, mindfully,
respectfully – respect for the normally unheard, that is.
Some species of washboard sound.
Squeaks from a cello and thrums
from a different part of piano. Tippytaps even
that sound like something issuing from... a tap, or from
mice (quite without irony). Imagine that. Play with that.
Stay with that. The squawks.
Sounds that, now that they have
had their crucial melody supplied
from within,
are illumined, readable, bearable even.
There they are: there, and there, truly
any place you care to turn.
All waiting for a chance
to chime,
to complete,
to totally destroy
the desire to hear,
to see, to presume, the predictable.
POEM II
FINDING SOMETHING ELSE TOGETHER
So your poet/artist/insert-idler-of-choice has a bone-lazy moment
to think: things, art and that.
Beauty, even – OK, not like that.
All species of stuff could lie tastefully wrecked, overgrown, neatly
blemished. Rust, plenty of scope in that. Doing beauty, even? Mute
embrace? Blood-rushing race to help,
grandly save?
Even just a plainsong of a life, shouldering pain artfully.
And always there's the pure animal grace
of movement as such:
the pregnant curve of the high-kicking bound
(think about it) to kill – the fierce face,
the big roar mouth
(what else would it need?), eyes lighting up at the scream that
trumpets: victim!
And here comes the curve ball, crunch thought:
soldiers – beauty – bullet that pops into its target so flawlessly
fiercely, mid-chest, exactly so...do their eyes widen, their heart
leap to its feet
with the sheer perfection of that?
Beauty, art, definitions (bet you wish now you hadn't). As if
there was anything at all guaranteed
to be light, purely.
Something like the damn cherries of life that you'd pick out,
given the option.
ANGELA ARNOLD lives in North Wales and in addition to being a poet is also an artist and a creative gardener. Her poems have appeared in print magazines and anthologies as well as online, in the UK and elsewhere. Her collection In|Between is forthcoming with Stairwell Books later this year.