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Long Distance Conjuring

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(from the music of Lost Trail)

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Listen to small sounds
on the lost trail, the scrape
and scritch of the world.

The music is hardly there;
when it is you might
prefer to call it noise.

On the long walk home
we notice many things.
The elusive and ignored

come sharply into focus,
nature catches at the skin,
ears become accustomed

to paying attention:
radio static in the woods,
someone crying far away,

a broken hearing aid
that keeps whistling
and needs attention.

•

The house that vanished
is still standing there
against the broken horizon
as the music skitters
across whatever is beneath,
something between a moan
and a hum, a broken memory
from a voicemail machine.
Cemeteries await us all,
but in the meantime
we can mourn these drops
of piano and damaged beats,
as a man with a foreign accent
announces the end of the world
and the cold light fades away.

•

At the top of the stairs
is another dream,

in another life the news
is on repeat, looping

around itself to find
something to say.

All the doors in my head
open into my brain,

a dead letter drop
you would do best to avoid.

Damn this constant darkness
and the secrets it conceals.

Listen to the small sounds
of sirens and ghosts outside.

The music is hardly there;
it might be only noise.

o

o

Rupert Loydell is Senior Lecturer in English with Creative Writing at Falmouth University, and the editor of Stride and With magazines. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including The Return of the Man Who Has Everything, Wildlife Ballads of the Alone all published by Shearsman Books. An artist’s book-in-a-box, The Tower of Babel, was recently published by Like This Press; and Encouraging Signs, a book of essays, articles and interviews by Shearsman. He edited Smartarse for Knives Forks & Spoons Press, From Hepworth’s Garden Out: poems about painters and St. Ives for Shearsman, and Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh, an anthology of manifestos and unmanifestos, for Salt. He lives in a creekside village with his family and far too many CDs and books.