If there’s a tune no one remembers.
The words fall away and the voice
remembers in bits, trailing out –
O when you loved me
When the wind in a garden
When the carousel
In our songs innocence comes back,
our childhood some moment a throstle
sang in the orchard at day’s end,
you sat among blossoms and moths.
O when you loved me.
Till with love’s fury I came
to murderer’s home.
Don’t I know you? Did we meet
when last time you were victim,
I the persecutor? Maybe.
For the prosecution:
I arrested him.
His reply was
I’ve got nothing to say.
He then said Answer me truthfully officer
how many pubs in Weymouth
am I not banned from?
Here’s a man with a hammer
banging the sound under his fist.
The sound grows as it travels,
dies down its wavelength.
Maybe that’s his wife he’s beating,
beating with a hammer. Maybe
with the nails between his teeth
and the hand and the hammer raised up.
Maybe her. Maybe him. Maybe me.
Where love stays. Where
there are no prisons, no police.
That world you speak of, friend,
lives in another song in a tune
I can’t recall, another tale
told at the road’s turn where wind
moves among beeches. I know.
I was there. The wind told me.
Grieving the years out.
I have made a room in the wind
where the days grow tired of each other.
It is a weepy sound, my grief
but it is not weeping. Harsh,
it is not anger with anyone.
So wide was my journey.
The moon shines on the sea,
it does not intend to.