My uncle can only thumb
through picture books
and pause at towns he knows.
Remember their beaches' scent
or chill of their blue-rimmed mountains.
The taste of pub food eaten
when my mum was a child,
some fifty years ago.
He remembers how the next door neighbour
smiled when she asked for milk.
The clink and splash of a Shilling
his brother rolled, by accident,
down a drainpipe.
The exact yellow of a canary
some sixty years dead.
He never learnt to read
beyond the suns slants and angles
or count beyond
the number of sugars
to stir into his own cup of tea.
But he knows how
to fit jigsaws in the way
a well-trained conductor
leads an ochrestra,
he doesn't need the pictures.
He could do it blindfolded
just the touch of his felt-tip
smudged fingers alone.
It is in this way too
that he plays the piano.
Eyes tight shut, swaying to that melody
hidden in his head for half a century
and never voiced, but always, like a CD
housed in an old Jukebox
ready to be picked and listened to. |
Submission Name: Talent in Teacups
