Poem

PLAY FOR ME

by

Tom Saunders
 

Your grandmother's ring,
a diamond propeller,
span light from your finger.
She, undaunted like you,
had flown point-to-point
around the globe, alone
but for a compass
and a flask of coffee.

Roof pricked with rust,
the hanger stank of oil and pigeons.
Rods of sunlight falling like rain,
eddying dust in clouds around our feet.

You turned your smile from my face
past farm machines to where
a parlour piano, guano lace
along its top, disclosed yellowed tusk.
You took my Indian shirt
from the bed that morning.
Naked beneath it, salty from the night
you sat and played "Blue Monk,"
dead notes, notes sour as bed-springs,
clustered one with the other.
Cubist chords you said,
traffic swerve and jive,
fistfuls of the city.

Strangers by time,
I saw you once more,
heard you once more,
without meaning to,
as is the manner of things.
A concert in the wakeful,
watching hours.
You at a baby Steinway in L.A.,
lit up the TV screen
singing a song I did not know,
in a style I did not like,
or feel.

You wore a black dress,
stars tumbled on your shoulders,
your presence hypothetical,
points of coloured light,
half the world, a flight away.
Nothing of me against your skin,
Nothing of me in the music you play.

####

Tom Saunders lives in Oxfordshire, UK with his wife Jean, an environmental activist.

He began writing in his mid-thirties while taking an English degree at Kingston Polytechnic. Later, he went on to do an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

His stories have been published in UK print magazines PANURGE, ACCLAIM, INKSHED and VOYAGE. In 1995 he was an award winner in the Ian St James international short story competition and his story "The Philosopher Nabel at the Kaffeehaus Eleganz" was published in the anthology PLEASURE VESSELS (still available at Amazon on both sides of the Atlantic!). Order HERE through BOOKS WE LIKE

On the net, he’s been published in MINDKITES, IN POSSE REVIEW and his story "Brother, What Strange Place is This?" was in ZOETROPE ALL-STORY EXTRA (January 2000).

You can reach him at tomfoolery@tomfoolery.worldonline.co.uk.