SOUNDS
for my father on his seventieth birthday

You dug the chalky soil; we blazed spring-trails
through high, sopping beechwoods; and in the shed
examined, catalogued and then displayed
quartz crystals, coins, potsherds from Bledlow Ridge,
fossils from the chalk-pit, at night I heard
you play – while you charmed babeldom I slept.

After a while I brought you drafts. I thought
the gardener and walker-in-the-rain,
the patient keeper with whom once I found
a Constantine, the music-man whose Dance
was sung in mildewed church, cathedral nave
and concert hall would know about word-spells.

You treated them with proper seriousness.
I see you at your study door, smiling,
taking the sheets; and then you close your eyes,
withdraw into that magic gloom of books,
piano, harmonisphere, preparing for
our sessions with small signs and spider-marks.

You thinned my words like seedlings. And avoid
long words where short suffice. (Work; will do)
For vogue and buzz and all-too-commonplace
you wrote in almost timeless substitutes
(ex-Yeats, ex-Graves). Revise and then revise.
Our second thoughts strike deeper than the first.

Sometimes you mused aloud, or asked me how
my craft related to the science of sound -
abstract in this, its power akin to music.
And sound, you told me then, includes silence.
One part of the performance, integral...
I hear myself. Hear all that's left unsaid.

Kevin Crossley-Holland