I test the acoustics of the room

with singing

alone, in the break between lessons.

 

Amazing sonic lift. This could be a cathedral 

or that bunker chamber at Hill 60.

Of all the things I didn't expect today

this one strikes me flat.

 

I stop my voice

suddenly.

 

A high ceiling tapers to a point,

a triangle of resonances in the sky.

A wedge of light sound

and I'm singing to span the space between lessons

now twice written as lesions.

 

I start my voice

that never stopped.

The women have goose-bump eyes

smile, cyclonic faces settle

into Dransfield's poem

projected

high on this white institutionalised wall.

 

Overhead transparency 

lays the poem as bare

as her hair on his arm. The 'yet'

carried in wide space;

space Mallarmé would have thrilled:

an absence

of indecision. I tell them things

I don't speak to the outside.