In Session 

 

…and then the musician’s came.

 

Bringing their landscape with them;

Bounded in the unbarred cadence of horses a

Flag upon the air. The flute

 

Remembered birdsong, soft wind

Beneath her notes made buoyant a feathering of

Fingers as the whistle chased

 

Her tail in a sympatry,

Small wings tilting a lilting melody outside

Of the guild. The fiddle, he

 

Laughed at their dancing and ran

It ever faster into unexpected weather.

Raindrops falling into reeds;

 

An oboe of memory.

The guitar attempted a neutrality of

Tone (ignoring the banjo)

 

As the mandolin made all

Else feel undressed, picking a course in unison

With a scale only she could

 

Be tempered to hear, the fear

Of time a bodhran’s beaten heart beneath their feet

In the Illusion of clogs,

 

Kept at heel.  The squeezebox was

The first to forget their name as the mouthorgan

Washed in a free-flowing pint.

 

A pile of pipes lay encased

In a pause against the wall, unable to tune

Before a coda’s tag and

 

The poor harp trembled into

Every rest. An epic jig came for them all

In the end; with splintering

 

Semi-quavers sucking out

Breath and unsaddling bridges to scatter strings

In a slippage of sound the

 

Spittle settling like leaves.

Heads of frayed hair bowed out and the tipper tripled

His last into a slide of

Skin to the flattened squeak of

Unexpected octaves from the desperate reach

Of sour devils, the melody pitching ‘to

 

Silence. Half empty glasses

Shivered in the after shock

(With the still quivering harp).

 

A survivor coughed, that

Dark, cavernous cough which heralds closure and

Brooks no encore. Cases snapped

 

And smoke imbued velvet from

Sessions long gone wrapped the exhausted medleys

Into a wayfaring past.

 

And then the singers began…

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