festival notes., poetry.,

early july., edinburgh.

it was the morning after the american independence day and i was waking up on a mattress on the kitchen floor in an old lady friend's flat. as i lay stirring slowly into wakefulness i hear her moving about in the corridor, her man's voice as well a quiet bass chatter speaking through the walls, an excellent american intellectual. i can feel a heavy head on account of the bourbon we had celebrated with last night including limes and sugar - good kentucky sour mix - and then while i'm still looking out the curtainless window trying to gauge the time of day by the grey northern light and sounds of traffic outside she comes bowling in all fresh faced with her thick black hair curling in rough loops over her shoulders and asks straight out if i wanted to hear some poetry , yes i reply stumbling over the single syllable trying to force voice out of dry water wanting throat and so she's suddenly reading this out to me still slumped in bed under heavy black coat body listening intently through blurring eyes to the walt whitman and i know the poem but have never heard it so beautiful and magic and it danced on her voice like sounds sometimes do in dreams ... and it reminded me in a strange way of when i had been sitting out in the park some days before with a troop of Spaniards - they always have a military air to their gatherings i have found - and i was reading them my own poetry and though they didn't understand most of the words they were urging me to read on another and another and with hand signals and gestures and broken english and spainish we understood each other in conversation but somehow the sounds and rhymes of the poetry still meant enough to them that moment and later on that same night back in some cold water flat somewhere near the docks of leith we had a ball acting out stories living in some realm outside spoken language, and again, i felt the touch of something greater yet more elemental to us all brush my tiny fragile being.

hesq.,