[Meeting Minute 0609]
Is this our art,
Crossed conversations,
Connection, a fluid thing,
A tenuous shifting?
Full of eccentricities:
Metalwork birds;
Space-ship sheds for men
To sit in, to smoke
And dream away
The strangeness;
And the policeman’s lot,
(How times have changed)
Arrested by the decades;
And the factory man, still
Revisiting his travels;
For the blacksmith and his monkey:
Stolen tools lay hidden in the rafters
Till monkey fingers were burnt
By someone else’s cruelty;
And, in a chimney breast,
Leached mortar had turned to sand;
Inside, the tar of years gone up in smoke,
Hard-panned on the stones.
Art, indeed, word and image,
Imagination spurred against time
By the idle hours, the passing world
Sliding helplessly down the street.
Who speaks into darkness when the light
Is dim in the back room, where the sound
Of whispered tea and cakes shyly beckons
The unwitting to their indulgences?
These meetings are impossible to describe,
Impossible to record or to ever understand.
Just as memory persists and reinvents itself
Coiling like story around the page or song
Loosely sung around a handful of notes
There is finally a harmony of silence
Like murmurs in the gloom or the steam from cups
Lifting into recesses and roof beams: these,
The recollections of a few old men.
Once more the meeting of minds… minds too deranged and addled by time and all-day breakfasts. This is the curse of growing old, when the assertion ‘my body is a temple’ refers only to a crumbling ruin in the care of Historic Scotland.
Once again, there came a reference to something formal. ‘ tried before’ I said, ‘to take notes, and look where that got me.’ Silence. The conversation had moved on even as I spoke.
But the discourse was ‘wide-ranging’, might I even say ‘full and frank’ or even ‘productive’? It had its own momentum. Like an avalanche, it sweeps all before it and leaves us all buried beneath a drift of words. Bewildered and immobilised.
So I wrote this minute of the proceedings. I know neither where it began nor where it will all end…
Crossed conversations,
Connection, a fluid thing,
A tenuous shifting?
Full of eccentricities:
Metalwork birds;
Space-ship sheds for men
To sit in, to smoke
And dream away
The strangeness;
And the policeman’s lot,
(How times have changed)
Arrested by the decades;
And the factory man, still
Revisiting his travels;
For the blacksmith and his monkey:
Stolen tools lay hidden in the rafters
Till monkey fingers were burnt
By someone else’s cruelty;
And, in a chimney breast,
Leached mortar had turned to sand;
Inside, the tar of years gone up in smoke,
Hard-panned on the stones.
Art, indeed, word and image,
Imagination spurred against time
By the idle hours, the passing world
Sliding helplessly down the street.
Who speaks into darkness when the light
Is dim in the back room, where the sound
Of whispered tea and cakes shyly beckons
The unwitting to their indulgences?
These meetings are impossible to describe,
Impossible to record or to ever understand.
Just as memory persists and reinvents itself
Coiling like story around the page or song
Loosely sung around a handful of notes
There is finally a harmony of silence
Like murmurs in the gloom or the steam from cups
Lifting into recesses and roof beams: these,
The recollections of a few old men.
© BH, 2017
Once more the meeting of minds… minds too deranged and addled by time and all-day breakfasts. This is the curse of growing old, when the assertion ‘my body is a temple’ refers only to a crumbling ruin in the care of Historic Scotland.
Once again, there came a reference to something formal. ‘ tried before’ I said, ‘to take notes, and look where that got me.’ Silence. The conversation had moved on even as I spoke.
But the discourse was ‘wide-ranging’, might I even say ‘full and frank’ or even ‘productive’? It had its own momentum. Like an avalanche, it sweeps all before it and leaves us all buried beneath a drift of words. Bewildered and immobilised.
So I wrote this minute of the proceedings. I know neither where it began nor where it will all end…
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