The Sound
It travelled mysteriously, via Clovis, New Mexico
to Dullsville, Lincs from Lubbock, Texas and without radio;
you heard it by chance through an open window, a form of motion –
guitar riff, voice, sweet explosion – and you hadn’t the least notion
who it might be, just clues on the vinyl but how could you know
who Hardin was, no newscast told you he was in love with Echo
and wore glasses and was white but toured with blacks and all was well
till the bus went south. A seven-mile ride to school was the only hell
you knew, sickness and chill, this was England, to get a fire to start
you had to put a coin in a slot in its unwilling heart,
unmoved by the hot gospel of love. All your longings were fed
by the sound. It would throb through puberty. It was motion that bled
through electric strings, it was masculine tenderness, unstrained.
But it moved too fast, only light was faster, and the bus complained,
said it was old, wouldn’t carry this inflammable cargo.
Travel through the air, it said, that’s the right way to go to Fargo
on the dead of winter dance party tour. Mysterious travel
it was that could affect you like this, make certainty unravel
and chance loom large and baffle: unfading, the quickening sound,
but lost in Iowa, on the coldest-ever snow-covered ground.
Page(s) 112
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