Repeated games
It’s in the dancing that rhyme is earned:
sing them a song, magpie and monolith,
of four hundred – but in the meantime, weren’t
there other games to play? The word’s a gift
and finite too so speak no waste;
contemplate the song before it’s sung:
all speech is inherited and haste
does no honour to the days when, young,
our kind gestured the sun, the floods, the shaping
wind, with hands in want of name. For music
was a trade. The prize, aping
birdsong; the cost, a species homesick,
each ticketed and allocated seat.
We’ve invented technique and drilled control,
but the inner life’s a wilderness, complete
and thick in wordless sense. So they extol
the clash, the body, the arching leap; they sing,
every man an umpire, their astonishment:
the weight of words changes things
but doesn’t affect your run, an equal temperament
all perfect thirds and fifths, somehow;
how can time and physics be defied?
The octave can’t fit twelve and so now
we’re left with narrow sixths and wide
fourths, but the indiscrete voice
isn’t bound to the same set tones.
It’s not the kick, not the tackle, the choice
weapon is the cry, the melody, the groan,
projected impossibly across the field:
the rapid phrases, hollow without peril,
and the sudden, immediate yield
of seed long since-sowed. The feral
verse of sensible fathers
and earnest sons is in chanting repeated names,
desperate to rise once more, rather
than yield, in spite of countless games.
