David Hart & David Hawkins
January 2009
DH
On the stairs
I knew only I had to be on the stairs playing my pretend back-alley flute, the shadowy room at the top no-one had entered these many years required nothing less, and if I had my pretend clown face on, smudged as well, this would serve better than my straw hat after a hot swim.
DHk
In the corridor
Bold colours in the open book opening on fields, hills, farms; not much text. A band of children, wading through reeds and corn swathes, tree climbing, brook trawling, and a jar of stickle-backs pricking bubbles, bubbles, a strand of weed:
the door to the lounge suddenly opened, and the massive draft opened onto me– so it was escape back to bed, the safe house, cloth-eared and quiet. I press escape now and nothing happens.
DH
On the roof
To remember the future so as to be there first and know the place, there has to be a key for it.
To hear the wind first and know whose door opens and why, there must be a way
to open the book before even it is printed, before thought or drafted, to be there in the reeds waiting.
Now, as things are, looking down through the skylight sure I can get the music right without instruments to discover who’s there.
DHk
On a level plane
By the desert of the fingerboard: ear to the soundhole, resting on smooth wood. Strings that have wound themselves looser over nights of silence – plucked, the harmonic curves, gains, turns and we can read the grain from its throb.
In the pocket: paper, comb at the ready – could go either way. Back in the bathroom: a bar of soap with the impression of a key pressed in. It will wash away, while the wind watches.
Scaffoldings of other buildings stand around, naked architecture sculpting space. But here we use space to sculpt the thing, rough melody roughed up from nothing.
Instruments, notes, paraphernalia threaten to hold it, but can’t.
DH
Running on the spot
In the lost room lit by two candles - was there a break-in, a shadow, a dream? - running on the spot slows to walking on that same spot to pausing on it to the plaint of the comb, thought held almost allowing a duet to surface for a nanosecond, long enough for the blessed primordial dance to be conjured. Still here! Still here!