Simon Turner

Five Sections from Spring Notations

Spring Haiku

1
bald jasmine sprays sprawl
across the trellis, bristling
in brisk April air

2
the chestnut’s flowers
gathered in tapered clusters –
spearheads or candles

3
first bat of the year
light shifts gear into violet
black trees, wings ticking

4
red campions joust
in the bright & tacky air:
a canvas, drying

*

A verbascum has rooted itself in our garden wall. Its leaves are gently fuzzy like an animal’s pelt & have a silver-grey tint to them, as if coated with a thin layer of dust. The leaves are vast towards the plant’s base, shrinking as they scale its length towards the yellow-crested rocket-rush of its flower-taper. Dozens of spiders have rigged their webs in the junctions between the verbascum’s trunk & its leaf-stems: the effect is akin to a skyscraper in mid-construction, New York workmen clambering the scaffold with lunch pails swinging in their gloved fists. Elsewhere I have seen them, verbascums, flourishing in the waste spaces beside the railway tracks, or sprouting from the dust of vacant lots, caged behind wire mesh fences threaded with bindweed. Our verbascum is no less brawny & vigorous than these garish congregations, for all the oddity of the vertical ground in which it has chosen to settle its roots.

*

Spring Images: after James Wright

The moon dissolves
in the silky tatters
of your laughter.

Thunderheads are massing
in the architect’s green dream.

Blind animals sleep
amid the stripped bones
of the morning.

*

Extract from a letter, 9th May 2008

“The robin who visits our garden grows increasingly tame – although I suspect he thinks of it as his garden, and Rochelle and I are allowed to stay merely on sufferance, as long as we continue to feed him. The wood mice have returned after a long absence, and have lost a lot of weight: one of them in particular had grown very plump over last summer, and could have sung tenor in an Italian opera. The garden’s a riot: our grass is not lawn grass but wild grass, which grows quickly and thickly and roughly, intercut with at least 2 dozen dandelions, already shin-high, shaggy and brazen. The great tit keeps waking us up with his two high notes, struck loudly and incessantly, from his perch in the holly at the back of the house. The starlings – half a dozen or so – can get through a plate of live mealworms in seconds, though we don’t begrudge them as they are feeding their young.”

*

Folksong

The flower in me
is a broke-backed weed,
leather-dark leaves,
petals dishevelled,

stones & trash
blotting the ground
of the empty place
where it prospers –

In C

this music is close to the surface
& the girl across the table’s asking you
to file her head

playing this record
is like watching the girl across the table
spinning a web & asking you
to file her garbage cans

her head is close to the music
a seismograph on the table
a timpani outside the window
subways justify the morning
dig it? all right, dig it

her head is playing this record
her head is playing this web of awareness
this record is her preconceptions
& it is not always pleasant to lose your head
in a web of musical assumptions

turn it on & it starts at the origins
the primal aesthetics of
the nitty-gritty window, dig it?
all right, dig your head
nobody’s asking you to file your hands away

all right, it’s refreshing
& it’s nobody’s trip
her hands playing the magical morning
a window is a beginning
& the morning is a window & moves
across the table making notes

& the listener’s a magical window
& the body’s rhythm’s the music of awareness
dig it? this girl’s as refreshing
as the magical face of morning
“quiet & overwhelming”
you’re transfixed in the matrix
dig it? dig it? the gentle matrix
of the nitty-gritty morning

garbage cans in your voluntary categories
garbage cans in the timpani ears, man
garbage cans & the window full of something
whatever it is it isn’t our memories
& the scattered permutations of morning
& our souls like seismographs
digging the carnival, digging the music
digging our nervous reactions

this record’s a magical window
& it’s the origins of her overwhelming hands
the permutations of the music
the origin of our voluntary souls
her head is full of music
& it’s overwhelming our reactions

the girl is staring at the patterns in the window
permutations of the morning
the garbage of experience
sound is texture & good things
are always pleasant –
her hands are unimportant
& the categories are aesthetic components
dig it? all right, dig it
your preconceptions are the origins of sound

her head, the table, the window
welcoming the morning
like a seismograph
welcomes the basic components of rhythm
somehow the scattered components
of the world move in our bodies
the nitty-gritty is exhilarating
dig it? music is something
determined by you

her hands are permutations of the music
we grow as we experience the morning
the music is making notes
& the soul can bring us together
the audience trips on experience
consciousness could be released
but it’s a voluntary business
her hands are unpredictable
our bodies are transfixed by
the nitty-gritty aesthetics

excitement of texture
excellence of origins
texture of morning
origins of energy
energy of excellence
exclusion of control

you might be aroused
but her head will welcome you in
it is full of beauty & subways
full of music, full of magic
this record is the listener’s awareness
dig it, dig it, dig the scattered soul
the music, the beauty her head is full of
the primal soul in the categorical garbage
dig it?

gentle & pleasant
our memories clash & integrate
this record is as fresh as the morning

[Improvisation based on the liner notes to Terry Riley’s ‘In C’, written by Paul Williams]