Title: Sport 37

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2009, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 37: Winter 2009

Tom Weston

page 86

Tom Weston

The Dying Man Plays His Pianola

Those puffing feet, those paddles, sculling
a slow boat with music jaunty in the air, his own
body's bellows bleeding, his panting feet.

Magic from New York, gleaming, glamorous even,
entirely new, renewed, resplendent perforation.
Pipes and pumps and paddles permitting sound.

Music of the brass tubes, the puffing silk-paper
bellows, each a breathing lung for the machine.
Driven air reading gaps in the line and

making Chopin. A factory of corridors and tunnels,
almost a city, a production line of mazurkas.
Air the glutton that beats on wires strung

in the black box, insisting upon tune, air building
notes, building phrases, pounding the ear's drum.
Everything in resonance, the harmonic teeth

driving each cog, forcing the spindle around,
the roll of paper punctuated by absence, and
absence activating song. His own lungs

leaking air, the paper rolls misread and sending
dud notes through his blood, his engineer's feet.
All the pumps in the world insufficient for now.

*

page 87

The grand act of forgetting, his body decrepit
and diminishing. Silence the only point of thought,
the finality of air forced through tubes

scorching the paper that carries the crescendo
with it, a holy pyre consuming what it reads.
His mind rich with trains and elevators,

retracting walls, the structures that plead his cause.
The essentials of passage, the very why of being.
Here's what he knows. The making and working

of machines, the paths the air follows, slamming
a hammer down. The music he cannot catch,
it out-runs his hands. There is the mystery,

his disappearing body an unsolved experiment,
fingers that no longer follow. Scrolls of notes
catching in his throat and sending static through

his mouth, coughing now his punctuation, coughing
now a new syntax, one that plays tunes here
and next year, re-creating the grammar of oblivion.

The holes burned by cancer, or radiation,
or both. Fix one, another comes, perdendo. Crank him
through the pianola, then he'll puff out a tune.

*

My friend, he sang six songs before breakfast,
like a bird all got up in its finery, all dressed for love,
a harp on which his breath would have the final word.

page 88

The Future is More of That

Cellphone, clasped with cigarettes and comb,
the essential oxygen, laid on the café table,
consulted and caressed. The future, immediately
available, convenient, compressed, consistent,
communication demanding attention.

A message from the beach, fingers jabbing
and making the air work, filling the air with letters,
the experience shared even as it happens, talking
them through it, instructions wrapping the globe
with sighs.

The future is a hard bargainor, stating its price,
everything driven to the present, history
the blink of an eye before the last blink, a world
choir in unison, rehearsing incessantly, babbling
and not listening.

Sitting with a smoke, checking for messages,
for suspicious sounds, sensations, shiny surfaces,
sending echoes out into the void. Sleep is out of
the question. It's all happening now, scouts
on high alert.

Numbers in combination flicking switches, invisible
pathways. Brought to the last ditch of things, the bunker
where the prophets count, stacking their oiled firearms
quite ecstatic with expectation, fearful that flashing
light will draw them down.

page 89

Home shifts around in your pocket, simply adding
rooms. Night and day are history, reduced to one
condition, communication subverting time. This is your
soul out there. Without this you are nothing, unloved,
and without meaning.

Captain's Rounds

The world sleek and unreliable, especially at this height.
Only sunlit at a distance, the clouds burnished—an awful cliché,

he thought, wondering at the precision of it, how he noticed
at all. And smell, it became intense, not just coffee

but strange chemical scents buffeting his nose, demanding
recognition. Playgrounds, memories, what made him certain.

Hither and yon over rogue countries, laundering their memories
of anything, the rivers so beautiful, so dead they could be rope.

The clutter of headphones, menus, safety cards, a newspaper.
All the paraphernalia of travel, its manifest words on his lap.

Forgotten, and he does not ask questions, now, it is unsafe.
He confines himself to commerce, liturgical almost in what

he buys and how he flaunts it, content to swap memory
for mammon. He asks no questions because he has no past.

Distance gave you that, the whole dimension.
Eleven thousand metres over Russia, tracking for Heathrow.

page 90

The wide world, there in Bubba's pod, first class in the nose,
wine at his elbow, Rattle and Hum on the swing screen.

Jesus, that was nostalgia. Years ago he'd seen it, that
serious thing they did, as if the world were good for saving.

Bubba's conscience feeling good at this height, clean as the
jet stream at eleven thousand metres, perfect patterns spread out

below him where all the messy business was, a hundred bodies
just dots, one pixel and another, a scramble of pixels.

He knew he'd have it sorted before lunch, consulting the menu.
It was about finding the right language, taking the obscure

and making clichés, arranging parts into a new shape like lovers
finding what legs and the teeth can do. Confident, he was,

easy when you stand so high you hear nothing too loud
and what you see is only what you let yourself see.