or stood in the square

by the students there, cheap violins

gleaming under their chins, the Bach Double

clapped by pigeons;

or smiled at the ragged choir

rattling their tins? What’s music

the food of? Send over a beer

to the bow-tied piano man to play it again …

a child’s hands

on the keys, opening a scale

like a toy of sound …

and who hasn’t lifted the lid

to pick at a tune with a fingertip –

Perfect Day, Danny Boy, Für Elise –

recalling a name, or a kiss;

the breath our lips shared,

unsung song?

When the light’s gone,

it’s what the dying choose,

the music we use at funerals –

psalms listed in roman numerals;

solo soprano singing to a grave;

sometimes the pipes, a harp.

Do you think music hath charms?

Do you think it hears and heals our hearts?

Orta St Giulio

My beautiful daughter stands by the lake

at Orta St Giulio; the evening arriving, dressed

in its milky, turquoise silks, her fortune foretold;

assonant mountains and clouds all around;

an aptness of bells from here, there, there, there. Ella.

I watch her film the little fish

which flop, slap, leap in the water, hear

her hiss yes, yes, as she zooms on fresh verbs

and my heart makes its own small flip.

I slip behind her into the future; memory.

A bat swoops, the lake a silence of dark light;

how it will be, must be.

The Dead

They’re very close to us, the dead;

us in our taxis, them in their hearses,

waiting for the lights to change.

We give them precedence.

So close to us, unknown on television;

dead from hunger, earthquake, war,

suicide bomber, tsunami.

We count the numbers.

The famous dead – a double glamour –

we buy their music, movies, memoirs.

O! Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra

in glorious technicolor.

In Venice, we glimpse the dead

drift to the island cemetery across the lagoon.

We float our gondolas along the green canals

and do not die.

Sung

Now only words in a song,

no more than a name

on a stone,

and that well overgrown –

MAR– –ORIS– –;

and wind though a ruined croft,

the door an appalled mouth,

the window’s eye put out;

hours and wishes and trysts

less than shadows of bees on grass,

ghosts that did dance, did kiss …

those who would gladly die for love long dead –

a skull for a bonnie head –

and love a simile, a rose, red, red.

At Ballynahinch

I lay on the bank at Ballynahinch

and saw the light hurl down

like hammers flung by the sun

to light-stun me, batter

the water to pewter,

everything dream or myth,

my own death further upstream;

the sleeping breath now – by my side

in our wounded sprawl – of the one

who did not love me at all,

who had never loved me, no,

who would never love me, I knew,

down by the star-thrashed river at Ballynahinch,