They bring you sunshine, M. and Wise:
They may not mean to, but they do.
They give all gags the script supplies
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were scripted overall
By blokes with hats and smoker-wheeze,
Who half the time were Music Hall
Half TV-in-the-70s.
Man/piano (it’s plays-what-he-wrotes):
Though Previn says it’s not thus scored. Ah!
He’s playing all of the right notes,
Though not necessarily in the right order.
The asterisks of wind turbines on the horizon
point us to footnotes in the field close by:
seven cows, fat as pharaoh’s dream
and the farmer tall and slender
coming up along with his sparking prod
to drive them from sun to shadowy shed.
Man, the Skeleton, will devour them all,
and not augment his thinness one gram.*
— —
*And so the eye returns to the skeletal electricity windmills, osteologically white, visible along the horizon line.
The car passes. Dust
devils rise in its wake
like heads of wheat.
Ash, willow, elm,
small-leaved limes.
a fishnet of shadow.
Barbecue smoke spills
across the lawn
like poured pollen.
A broadcast of petal-
shaped pieces of light
defines the pool’s surface.
The sunlight falls slower
than the sap ascending
these manicured trees.
We are all already
dead, we are the outnumbering
dead. The car passes.
