Rare

 

Rare

 

A belly laugh was a rare enough event

for him. At least, that’s how it was

if I was around. More likely a scowl;

he was British weather made flesh,

gathered clouds for a face, laced brows

straightjacketed up his spine

nostrils flared as though a crime

was taking place and me on the lookout

for any passing getaway driver.

A prescient field full of cows lying down,

but hark, here’s a clown,

turned up on Pebble Mill at One.

Why or how we were there, watching TV

for the present escapes me.

We should’ve been shoveling shit,

packing hay bags, raking straw off grit,

tearing up fences, digging the ditches

that would in time define the world.

But for now, look here. There’s a glitch,

a moment that insists it shouldn’t exist,

we are three, staring at a portable screen

for a second, sucking hot coffee.

She’s entranced, sipping blind faith,

watches as some charlatan claims

that Beethoven is inside his brain,

communicating even now, notes

the composer never wrote,

before he took his last, untimely breath

to leave the grieving world bereft,

and did you know that he was deaf?

Channeled by some ancient charm,

passed on, passed down,

into his fingers, through his arms,

and here, for the world, at last - the premiere,

of some five or six bar symphony.

I looked at him, looked again

and suddenly we’re both convulsed,

she shaking her head at two sceptics,

who are laughing like the drains never dug

to irrigate or bless those fallow fields.

But for one moment, something revealed,

blew the dust and shook the seal

of a legacy that never healed.