Overhead Transperancy
By Gareth Jenkins
Published 1 January 2021
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.