Ben, my favorite uncle, died this morning, and the world is instantly dimmer. I have been thinking about him a lot recently, unable to watch the Ken Burns documentary on Country Music without being mentally transported to Ben’s kitchen in Magherafelt, where he would deliver to anyone who would listen, a lengthy treatise on the contributions of Flatt and Scruggs
Ben was a talented and versatile musician, his guitar or his banjo an extension of himself. He started playing when he was a child, able to do so because my father, – just ten years old at the time and good with his hands – made him a guitar.
And, Ben kept playing. Even in the ravages of the rare cancer that would eventually take him from us, when Ben went for chemotherapy, the banjo went along with him.
Flashing back to my teenage years, when I was mostly bored with no interest in country music and much less in the conversations going on at my grandparent’s house on Sunday evenings, Ben would distract me, drawing out the opening to Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross on the guitar that was always close by. Only those who are from rural Derry can understand the incongruity of this at a time when a Northern Irish version of “Country and Western” dominated local radio, sung by people like Philomena Begley or the late Big Tom and his Mainliners. Ben was cool. He was a talker, but more than that, he was a listener with a genuine, eclectic interest in people and music.
One of my favorite memories of him comes from my brother’s recollection of my grandfather’s funeral. Our dad was one of the men doing “the lifting” that day, so my little brother needed a chaperone in the walking cortege. Ben did the honors, and understanding how strange the solemnity of it all might be for my 7-year old brother, he started the day by slipping him a five-pound note, knowing it would later be spent at the sweet shop. Unlike all the other men who were in dark-colored suits for Granda’ss funeral – without their overcoats because it was a sunny, dry day – my brother was in a light tan suit, the first my mother ever made, and Ben was, well, resplendent in a maroon corduroy suit that would have been perfect for an audition with Bob Dylan’s Touring Band or perhaps Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. A spectacular ensemble, that suit was as surprising as the gold tooth that flashed when he smiled and the rare sun that spilled through the dense canopy of trees that day. Quintessential Ben, it belonged perfectly as he led my little brother behind the cortège up to the Hillhead.
Less than a day before he died, I reached out across time and distance to call his daughter, Amanda, to maybe brighten her day. I hadn’t expected the opportunity, knowing how rapidly he had deteriorated in recent days, but when I heard her say, “Daddy, there’s someone from America on the phone for you,” I took it. I told him goodbye and thanked him for making me laugh when I was a child, for turning me on to some of the music that would change my life. Mostly, I wanted him to know how much I appreciated him being there – abiding – with my daughter in those dreadful surreal hours, following the news that her daddy had died so far away from us. And, my lovely Sophie got to thank him for that too.
It was hard to hear him breathe with such difficulty, Ben who had always been so quick with wit and word, struggling to breathe out the last words we would ever hear from him. He told me he was done but also that there was still some hope. Maybe he added the part about hope because he could hear me crying and he didn’t want me to fret. That kind of kindness was the kind I always knew from Ben. He had already made his final arrangements. He knew it was over. He was no match for the cancer. It had been a beast. A relentless beast.
His daughter told us how it touched him to hear the voices of my daughter and myself from so far away, that a tear rolled down his face. The circle was closed, and the day was now perfect.
He died peacefully in her arms in the early hours of this morning. She tells me she is so grateful – he was with her on her first day, and she was with him on his last. The circle is unbroken.
Ben, I will never forget you.
P.S. Ben, I didn’t know until today that you practiced this song over and over before perfecting it and performing it at your daughter’s wedding. Fitting, then, that it is the one we chose to honor you with Stephen Travers of the Miami Showband on bass guitar. I think you’d like that.
Original post for Van Morrison’s 70th birthday ~ Cyprus Avenue, Belfast, 2015
“And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it”
~ from “Had I Not Been Awake” In The Human Chain by Seamus Heaney.
Had I not been awake early one hot summer morning, I would have missed the goings-on on Cyprus Avenue. It was Van Morrison’s 70th birthday – Van Morrison whose music – like Seamus Heaney’s poetry – has scored much of my life. For the crowd gathered up on Cyprus Avenue to celebrate his birthday with him, a sense of wonder; for me, a homesickness Stephen King rightly describes as “a terribly keen blade.”
Social media and BBC Radio Ulster did their best to assuage the lump-in-my-throat melancholy – while at the same time making it worse – reminding me of the thousands of miles that stretch between there and here.
I am not there.
I am not there, with my college friend Ruth, to sing along and wonder if he might indulge us with a rendition of Cyprus Avenue which everyone surely wants to hear – for old times sake and because it is fitting. But you never know where you are with Van; you just remember where you are from.
Eight hours behind and a lifetime away, I related easily to those fans who traveled from other continents to sit among the eighty five trees that guard Cyprus Avenue and absorb Van’s Belfast, if only for an hour or two. Clicking on the link to the BBC Radio Ulster broadcast, I was transported instantly to my teenage bedroom in my parent’s house on the Dublin Road, tuning in to Radio Luxembourg – in the Days Before Rock and Roll.
Justin . . .
I am down on my knees
At those wireless knobs
Telefunken, Telefunken
And I’m searching for
Luxembourg, Luxembourg,
Athlone, Budapest, AFN,
Hilversum, Helvetia
In the days before rock ‘n’ roll
Specific and evocative, the names of streets in Van Morrison’s songs – Hyndford Street, Cyprus Avenue, Fitzroy – as much as the characters that people them and the rituals that shaped those lives – Madame George, the window cleaners taking a break for tea with Paris Buns from the shop, you taking the train from Dublin up to Sandy Row, kids collecting bottle-tops, all of us tuning into Radio Luxembourg on our transistor radios, going to the pictures, or the chipper, and filling ourselves with pastie suppers, gravy rings, Wagon Wheels, barmbrack, Snowballs – all these with a Sense of Wonder that has a universal resonance.
And all the time going to Coney Island I’m thinking,
Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?
Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?
I understand the pull that brought fans from other continents to Cyprus Avenue that day. They remind me of the time I drove from Tucson to Tucumcari and Tehachapi to Tonopah – places Lowell George immortalized in Willin’. While they turned out not to tourist destinations, nor did I see Dallas Alice in every headlight, I could hear Billy Payne’s grace notes on the piano and Lowell George growling about her every mile I covered. Too, I remember my first visit to San Francisco, drawn less by St. Dominic’s Preview and more by the sight of orange boxes scattered against a SafeWay supermarket in the rain. Can you hear the echo of Patrick Kavanagh in Van Morrison’s songs. I can. And I can understand how he might be finding God in ‘the bits and pieces of everyday.”
As a new mother, almost eighteen years ago, far away from my Northern Ireland home and in Arizona, it was “Brown Eyed Girl” that I sang to my green-eyed girl to help her fall asleep. When she did her first little dance as a toddler, a jaunty “Bright Side of the Road” kept her going. As she twirled and clapped her hands, I reminisced about a wee dander down Sunnyside Street, heading out with my friends on a Saturday night, and this song, so jaunty that it was used as the promotional jingle for a “Belfast’s got the buzz” campaign, around the time our wee country was picking itself up from all that had ravaged it for so long.
When I got over getting cancer and when I turned a corner in the world of widowhood, it was to my favorite Van Morrison song that I turned and turn. “When the Healing has Begun,” is a tour de force from “Into the Music,” the first Van record I bought from Ronnie Miller’s Pop-In record store in Antrim. A far more satisfying thing than the school lunch I was supposed to buy – it fed my soul. I played it until I knew the lyrics by heart. And there they stayed until about twenty years later when I found a pristine copy, a German import, still in its protective plastic, at Tracks on Wax then a treasure trove for lovers of vinyl in Phoenix, Arizona – before vinyl became cool and collectible for a new generation.
I had worn out that song, which required some effort. In the days before record players like mine had to compete with tape decks, CD players, and MP3 files, if I wanted to hear a song just one more time or just the opening breath of it, there was no simple replay button, no nonchalant click; rather, the knack of placing the stylus right in the groove, in “the sweet spot,” where it would pick up the familiar repetitive rhythm, the violins, a “yeah” from Van, and “we’ll walk down the avenue again.”
Cyprus. Fitzroy. Belfast. Phoenix. it matters not. We are anywhere and everywhere. We are underneath the stars. Neither here nor there. It enchants me still – and maybe even Van himself – this song that takes him from a roar through a mumble to a barely there whisper at the end. And when the familiar refrain streamed across a continent into my kitchen in the desert with appreciative whistles from a Belfast crowd, my whole world stopped for a second. Hypnotized momentarily. Such is the “aesthetic force” of that song for me.
Back street jelly roll . . .
And all the way back to the first time I saw him perform it, at the Ulster Hall in Belfast. Leaning forward from the good seats in the balcony – having scored tickets from a friendly roadie in the Crown Bar – it was like being in church, somehow knowing we should behave and be quiet, reverent even, if he was going to take us along with him on this song. And he did.
And the healing begins . . .
And we’ll walk down the avenue in style
And we’ll walk down the avenue and we will smile
And we’ll say baby ain’t it all worthwhile
When the healing has begun
A version of this article appeared in the Ulster issue of Reading Ireland.
There is no denying Gerald Dawe’s sense of wonder for Van Morrison – and for Belfast – in his lovely book In Another World.Culled from all the material Dawe has published on Morrison since the 1990s, it is a portrait of these artists in and of Belfast, their “otherness” in the city that made them, a city that changed forever when sectarian violence took possession of it in the late 1960s. In his preface to this little volume of essays, Dawe welcomes us in to partake of all on offer in Belfast the early and mid-1960s, a wondrous time for the northern capital, a mecca for live music in dancehalls and ‘hops’ all over the city, and in living rooms and parlors, its people tuned into the radio. In his North Belfast home, young Dawe is immersed in a world of creativity, “fascinated by stories overheard” about the way things used to be – in the songs of his opera singing grandmother, of Cleo Laine and Sarah Vaughan, of Ella Fitzgerald on the gramophone. This is another world, a lost world where all the young dudes in Belfast wore black arm-bands following the news that Otis Redding had died in a plane crash in Wisconsin. It was in this other world that Ella Fitzgerald performed one night, and when Dawe’s mother returns home from the gig, she tells him, “I’m sent.”
In the heart of this rocking city, he places Van Morrison, a working man working out his songs with “the accent you heard in the streets,” helping lead the way for Dawe to emerge as a poet, with a new confidence that it was possible to be both “a Belfast guy and lyrical.” Armed thus, two Orangefield Boys School alumni begin their journey in a “city dominated by work, work, work.” But theirs is a creative labor, a different kind of work than expected of them in industrial Belfast. In Another World is a tribute to that labor and to the city that inspired it before The Troubles “put into quarantine those kinds of energies.”
As he has explained elsewhere, Dawe is a poet in love with “the notion of cramming a world into a short space on the page, by allusion, turn of phrase, suggestion,” a notion that is realized in this slim volume of just 116 pages. Reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s thatcher, Dawe has the Midas touch, “pinning down his world, handful by handful,” with trademark exactitude. The world that produced Van Morrison and Gerry Dawe is a red-bricked “civic landscape of class distinction,” in which children learn their place very early in life. In his music, Morrison revisits this Belfast, in songs of innocence and experience as the guy who worked in a meat-cleaning factory, a chemist’s shop, and as a window-washer in Orangefield. It is in these lyrics that Dawe finds a kinship with Patrick Kavanagh, in the “walking down familiar streets in search of that elusive authentic past, although when he asks Morrison about the Kavanagh connection in a 1995 public conversation, the transcript of which is included in the book, the singer keeps it simple: “It’s really all the same. The difference is you just do it with music.” This suffices for Dawe, the acclaimed poet who once responded when asked If he could write his epitaph in no more than 10 words, what it would be and why,
Gerald Dawe, Poet, born 1952 Belfast. The simpler it is the better.
In retrospect, Dawe is surprised by Morrison’s candor, aware as the rest of us of the singer’s reputation as a notoriously difficult interviewee. Throughout his career, Morrison has explained repeatedly that he will not and, more importantly, cannot “intellectualize” or engage in the kind of navel-gazing analysis of his music that will compromise what Dawe calls “the fate of genuine artistic endeavor.” Not surprising then that Morrison has delivered more than a few blunt responses to interviewers who have not been paying attention, reminiscent of Bob Dylan in that famous 1965 press conference in San Francisco. When asked if he thought of himself as a protest singer or a rock and roll singer, young Dylan replied, “Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man.” Case closed.
Similarly, any attempt to pigeon-hole Van Morrison is a fool’s errand. Hip to this, Dawe probes to determine the source of the songs, where the lyrics come from. And, Morrison tells him.
Morrison now in his seventies is the consummate performer, a recording artist still on the road honing his craft, doing what he refers to as “earning my living” as he has done since beginning his musical apprenticeship in the early 1960s. Already as gruff as John Lee Hooker, he seemed much older, having written “Gloria” when he was a teenager, playing in the city’s clubs, Sammy Houston’s Jazz Club on Great Victoria Street and at The Maritime.
Asserting himself with all boldness, he served his time in Belfast until 1967 when he “ran out of space” and left for New York. “I worked my way from my Belfast to New York and didn’t even know I was there because it was work,” Morrison once remarked in a 1987 interview. A year later, he would record Astral Weeks. Dawe clarifies that contrary to what many music critics have described as a breakthrough record for Morrison, Astral Weeks is a compilation of work – a vision – that he had begun sketching in Belfast. Considered together, its songs mark a poetic shift, presenting another mode – another mood – for the singer. Most resonant and relevant for Dawe is its centerpiece composition, “Madame George,” a farewell not only to Morrison’s youth, but also to a way of life in a city still unblemished by bombs and bullets and unnecessary bloodshed. For young Gerry Dawe, it is a farewell to a place where curiosity and creativity had flourished, where he and his friends “did not know a great deal about sectarianism. It just wasn’t part of the psychic landscape.” As Dawe describes it, “’Madame George’ is a portrait of a society about to withdraw from public view at the same time as the voice which describes it is also leaving the scene.” The reality is that fifty years ago, Astral Weeks may not even have been on the radar in Northern Ireland, its people more intent on what was happening in Derry in 1968. For some, it would take thirty years to fully absorb the blow that Astral Weeks was their Paradise Lost – it was Seamus Heaney’s “music of what happens.” This poignant goodbye to Belfast may indeed prompt readers to indulge in fantasies about another world that might have been.
What if the storm never came?
With the insight of a local, Dawe meanders through space and time, from the attic of his house in North Belfast overlooking the city’s amber lights below to streets and characters and urban rituals now familiar to a global audience – to Cyprus Avenue and Fitzroy, to the lower Falls and Orangefield, to Hyndford Street and the Beechie River and out to the Castlereagh Hills. There’s Madame George, and Sam and Van cleaning windows before breaking for tea and Paris buns and lemonade in the corner shop; there’s “the soldier boy older now with hat on, drinking wine”; there’s the train from Dublin up to Sandy Row, and, in “Boffyflow and Spike,” which Dawe reads aloud while Morrison accompanies him on guitar, there is a sense of wonder: “wee Alfie at the Castle picture house; pastie suppers at Davy’s Chipper, gravy rings, barmbracks, wagon wheels, snowballs. A Sense of Wonder.” Going back to a time “when the world made more sense,” as Morrison proclaims in his 1991 Hymns to the Silence, it would be reductive to characterize In Another World as a sentimental trip to a place where the grass is always greener. Nonetheless, it is a journey of nostalgia, and it is worth noting, as Dawe has pointed out previously, the etymology of the word: “Nostalgia is about the pain of home, -nostos – home, and algia – pain.” In Another World is a more nuanced imperative to get on with the show, summed up in the title track of Morrison’s 2003 album, “What’s Wrong with this Picture” – “Don’t you understand I left all that jive behind?”
His journey from “the home place” in pre-Troubles Belfast to a space where he could pursue artistic life on his own terms is not one that can be packaged in the myth of modern celebrity culture. As Dawe describes it, Morrison’s work inhabits a space that “has continuously moved in and out of his audience’s expectations,” the artist a wily critic of the crassness and commercialization of a music business that “thrives on and exploits disclosure” of the private persona behind a typically recalcitrant public self. Morrison leaves no doubt about this, once stating that “music is spiritual, the music business isn’t.”
His spiritual journey began in a childhood home that was full of music. His father, a shipyard worker and an avid record collector, was the key influence, with an enormous collection of rare American blues and jazz vinyl. As Morrison himself acknowledges, “There was probably only ten big collectors of blues and jazz in Belfast and my father was one of them.” Fitting then, that at the age of nine, Morrison was already a fan of Jelly Roll Morton, Lead Belly, and Solomon Burke. Orangefield Boys School was no match for the education he received from his father’s astonishing collection of jazz and Wild West books or from the movies of the day. His years at school were not helpful. A self-described freak, Morrison explains that
“There was no school for people like me . . . either we didn’t have the bread to go to the sort of school where we could sit down and do our own thing or that type of school didn’t exist.”
Thus, he was never taught about the Irish writers or any literary traditions. It was through other often solitary means that he discovered Dickens, Kerouac, Yeats, Blake, Kavanagh, Joyce, Heaney, and his own distinctive voice as an Irish writer. Unlike Dawe, a poet, literary critic and former Professor of English and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, Van Morrison brings no academic credentials to his craft. He brings to it what he tells Sean O’Hagan in 2008, an exploration of the themes of “all Irish writing . . . Basically, Irish writers, and I include myself here, are writing about the same things . . . Often it’s about when things felt better. Either that, or sadness… It’s the story about going back and rediscovering that going back answers the question, or going back and discovering it doesn’t answer the question. Going away and coming back, those are the themes of all Irish writing.” Or more succinctly,
There are two stories in music – leaving and going home.
Now in his early seventies, having released his 40th album, The Prophet Speaks, Morrison describes himself as a “work in progress.” His second album of 2018, it is a collaboration with jazz multi-instrumentalist Joey DeFrancesco and marks a return to the blues and jazz that inspired him as a young musician in Belfast, a journey back to “the old way, the jazz way.” Previewing it from the Europa Hotel in Belfast, Morrison says “It goes back to Into The Mystic and various things I’ve written so it’s new and old; there’s a thread which is ongoing.” Still a journeyman, honing his craft, Morrison reiterates his commitment to the labor as inseparable from the homing instinct that is a powerful motif in his work, explaining in a statement to Rolling Stone, “It was important for me to get back to recording new music as well as doing some of the blues material that has inspired me from the be- ginning. Writing songs and making music is what I do, and working with great musicians makes it all the more enjoyable.”
Morrison shares the cover of the record with the ventriloquist dummy from Educating Archie, evoking the radio program from his childhood. Apt, this tribute to a time and a place Dawe captures as one where “people really did get on with it; and get it on,” the kind of stoic yet soulful quality Seamus Heaney summed up as “keeping going.” Journeying back, it is a tribute to radio, a wireless portal into another world – a free world – in “the days before rock n roll.” As Dawe reflects,
“radio was our way into the wider world. At first it was the big old woolen-faced box in the corner and then the moveable transistor which was carried around like an iPhone . . . the radio was a great connector; it made a younger generation feel that even while you might have been up in the back bedroom on your own, you knew there were thousands like you ‘listening in’ and that conversations were had about whose new single was just out, or an album. Or simply playing back music from before.”
Dawe’s final chapter of this particular journey In Another World opens with lines from the late Mose Allison, a genre-defying artist revered by Morrison, who once referred to himself as “the man without a category” in a world eager to place him in one. Closing the book on Van Morrison’s Belfast, it is through Allison’s lens that Dawe ponders the only question that continues to matter. This world is another world once more:
Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at achor.
To test its heat by ear
she spat in its iron face
or held it up next her cheek
to divine the stored danger.
Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron
like a plane into linen
like the resentment of women
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass
through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
A couple of years ago, in an act of mild rebellion, I donated my ironing board to Goodwill. This was no small act, given that I was reared in Northern Ireland by a mother who ironed everything, including dishcloths and handkerchiefs. On this, her birthday, she is far away in the place that made her, rural South Derry. And, when I close my eyes to imagine her there, she is not as she usually is these days, inches away from me on a computer screen struggling to remember a password. Rather, she is standing at the ironing board in the kitchen of my childhood home on the Dublin road. Deftly, she places the steaming iron in its stand and turns to shake out one of da’s shirts. Resuming “the smoothing,” she eases into a story she has told before, a lesson in it for good measure.
The water is wide, but it takes only a second to transport me home. Ma, leaning over the ironing board, smoothing out with hot steam the wrinkles in pillowcases, pausing for dramatic effect – to remind me to consider the lilies, to “mark her words” that there will be plenty of time for work and plenty of fish in the sea. Implicit in her explicit admonishment not to wish my life away, was the fact that she was not wishing my life away.
Mostly, she has struck an artful balance between shielding me from the world while empowering me to find the voice to explore its realities. But not all the time, especially not when I was in the throes of adolescent boredom, my eyes rolling to the heavens in response to the kind of home-spun wisdom I never thought I would miss. Not all the time, because our world was in Northern Ireland.
I recall a morning in the summer of my 12th year. It was wash day, and I was bored. My mother was ironing, and the quiet of our kitchen was interrupted only by occasional bursts of steam and the voice of the man on the radio. With an uncharacteristic solemnity, he was telling us that on their way home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge, The Miami Showband, the Irish Beatles – had been attacked in a vicious, premeditated ambush, that members of the band were dead including heartthrob lead singer, Fran O’Toole.
Our David Cassidy was dead.
Until this moment, with unfathomable naïveté, we believed musicians like The Miami were immune. For so many of us, they had represented what could be, themselves and their audiences criss-crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries. It was as bass guitarist Stephen Travers recollected in his address to The Hague some years later, “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.” It didn’t matter. On that night in 1975, what happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much of a target as the rest of us. It became known as “The Day The Music Died,” but such a tagline fails to convey the monstrosity of it, the chilling choreography behind it, and the harrowing legacy of. As Stuart Bailie points out “The paramilitaries had literally shot the piano player.”
Eventually, we would hear reports that the handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, had been shot 22 times in the face. Twenty-two times. Vulnerable and on the ground, he had begged for mercy from men who only kept shooting. Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Tony Geraghty was shot in the back – four times. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the air. Des suffered only minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen was seriously wounded and survived only by pretending to be dead. Later, he recalled the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.
That summer morning, I remember my mother kept ironing one of my father’s shirts, all the while shaking her head and muttering to God. It was unimaginable – young musicians, Catholics and Protestants, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. No longer in denial, what would become of us?
Eventually, I would flee Northern Ireland, and sometimes I still feel guilty for having left it. Perhaps the better thing – the best thing – would have been to stay – to stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night, to “stay on where it happens.” To keep going, like my mother and father, like my childhood friends, like all the families most grievously harmed by our Troubles, all hurt but buoyed by hope and the promise of peace.
From the sectarian and political, to the personal, my mother’s birthday draws me back to another world, another time with her, when I knew my dance steps well. The miles between us fall away, and there she is rushing in from our back garden, a great armful of shirts and sheets rescued from the clothes-line just before another rain. Next is the ironing, and then the folding, a precise\and intimate ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.
My daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s kitchen on the Dublin Road, but on the sandy edges of California, late on an August afternoon before the fog rolled in. Facing me, a blanket stretched between us, she steps forward, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers. In the middle we meet, and there we pause to make the final fold.
Unbeknownst to us, her father took photographs. He wrote our names in the sand and waited for the tide to wash them away. Forever.
“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line Made me think the damp must still be in them But when I took my corners of the linen And pulled against her, first straight down the hem And then diagonally, then flapped and shook The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, They made a dried-out undulating thwack. So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened For nothing had that had not always happened Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Coming close again by holding back In moves where I was x and she was o Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.”
