Ray Templeton
Suite, ensuite
Again that same place: the taut, unscented air
beneath the vaulted ceiling of an empty church
chosen for echoes, in Amsterdam, those years ago.
Fingers lifting from final notes, a soft hollow thump
of hammers settling, sounds as tones die.
Tape stopped, the report is caught; easily cut
but not – survives for no good reason on to disc.
The music was eternal, outside time, but that tap
is one second of one minute of one marked day
– an instant trapped in resin dropped by sound.
A freeze-frame moment: out there on the street
are people stopped, abruptly, as they walk
or sit in silenced cafés, where smoke hangs still.
On Prinsengracht, bicycles impossibly balance
a glass of Amstel pauses on its way to dry lips.
Wrong steps not taken, or ruinous words unsaid
yet a cursory look endures, to repeat each time.
A dead man alive, and fit – his existence
evanescent, circumscribed – looks at his watch.
Every tick is fugitive but this one caught in flight
keeps his memory in flitting immortality. Then
insistent electronics move the player on
and clocks resume control, the passing fugue released:
milk spills, wheels spin, trams roll on to the terminus.
Page(s) 30
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The