Upwind

I get up from the table and turn off the radio and as the silence settles around me I figure there’re radio waves still coming this way and upwind there’ll be the transmitter and a radio station, where in a room full of coffee cups and heaps of typing paper there’s a needle inching in on the centre of a record.

Upwind of that in a recording studio somewhere, as a cello player nudges the notes into being, there’s the sense of something definite making way for something undefinable.

A striplight fizzles. The rug unravels. The fruit bowl’s too full of satsumas.

And further upwind in the schoolroom by an ocean where the composers create the hollows the notes will fill, a woman in a workshirt takes a pencil from a jam jar and breathes deep as she allows a thought to form.

I rinse out the coffee pot and boil more water; my mind slips into a melodic lull.

A spider plant thrives in the kitchen window. In either direction a cyclist goes by.

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