A New Release for Ray

in memory of Ray Fletcher

As if we’d never left the Festival Hall’s
front stalls and that conductor (who was it, Ray?)

had never raised his arms for Also sprach …
as if no time had come between, the beat

of years had never started, the trumpeter
not played, you my age now, and I a boy …

today, an Odyssey begins, and we
can only try to have your themes and tunes

recorded lovingly, make you the Best
Available Version, the Critics’ Choice,

replay your life, Ray, in High Definition
through the latest Mission multi-channel:

The Story of a Man. Bring on Karajan
and the Berlin Phil! You would as happily

have pottered down the diamond mine of your
LPs and put on Swingin’ Safari,

but African Sanctus cries its call to prayer
and begs a holy send-off from the past

to hymn you on your last safari, away
from war, from life insurance, from the heathen

roar of Boeings as they bargain for the sun —
though, Ray, they never reach that ‘tent of stars’

the Ode to Joy can lift us to, when all
the men’s voices strain to those savage heights

’where surely a beloved Father lives …’
Another time, up in the gods, do you

recall we heard the Inextinguishable
performed, as if their lives depended on it,

by Japanese, their war drums battling out
a duel to survive? At home now, Ray,

let drums begin, then wind, then brass: draw tight
those bows and hear the fletched ash fly from speakers

turned like Jodrell Bank towards the stars —
the opening bars of Also sprach …, the closing

chords of Nielsen’s Fourth, or the Choral
Finale of Beethoven ablaze: you

the maestro, Ray, waving your arms and singing.

 

Venture to the Interior

for Stephen Hanvey

We both heard it: a tree
falling, distinctly, in the woods

behind us, just as we’d left
Haslemere, heading for Blackdown.

No wind, no sound either
of a chainsaw. Perfectly still

until that twitch at the ear,
that tug of roots and weird

collapse crushing the words
we’d dropped like husks.

Out of white silent leaves
a life cracked, its bulk

lying open to be divined
or pulped. Perhaps a tree

falls as in the bushman’s
story a star falls

knowing all our dates.

Hounslow

I
heard today
that the roof of my old house
had been ripped off by the vortex created
when the engines of a low-flying airbus made their
final approach

exposing		my first
bedroom		and its
steam		train
wall		paper
to the invisible night sky		to fly-by-wire and a testing

testing
howl
from
dark
interiors

For Penelope Shuttle

When the chalk carving
that hides its dragon
behind a comforting
white horse

rose to the surface
of our writers’ hoard
and I read ‘Uffington’
and you raised

a talisman on a chain
around your neck and
it was the same
white horse —

the words of my poem
linked and surfed
above our laptops
to Lyonesse

and every workshop
on time’s peninsula
weaving and unweaving
silver knots.

Camelford, 2006