Paul Munden

Road Closed

was emphatic,
but the rusty sign
hung on an open gate,
allowing him to kid himself
and drive on through –
up the narrow sandy track
in an erratic

sequence
of hairpin bends
towards the summit,
and as he continued,
with ever less option
to reverse, he began t ...

With daily practice

his stiff fingers found
a music of their own,
the muscle memory of his arm
a rhythm akin
to the unique routine

of a bird of paradise,
waiting for her to come
to his patch of ground
and allow him to impress.

Paul Munden

(Il Cimento dell’ Armonia e dell’ Inventione)
                    after Vivaldi
                                 & ...

The violin

perched, slack-strung,
on the dark wooden sideboard
of your Palermitan apartment
opposite the cathedral,
a gift you didn’t yet know
how to tune, let alone play.

Your guests ignored it,
heading straight for the plates
of cheese, olives, bread,
and wine in plastic flagons
from the market, music
flow ...

What he overhears

is the tumble of dried fruit – cherries, currants, raisins, sultanas – and the rest is imagined: cinnamon, the grated rind of an orange, sifted flour … then there’s a crack – ‘never mind, let’s try another!’ – and he pictures the smashed yolk wiped from the floor before the comic repeat, but he forges on with his own task, and later ...

Paul Munden has published five collections, most recently The Bulmer Murder (Recent Work Press, 2017) and Chromatic (UWA Publishing, 2017). He was reader for Stanley Kubr ...