Electronica

by Ted McCarthy

The chord shifts from smooth to sinister,
a wave of violet hovers
above the keyboard, the heat of imagined
years shocked by an electronic
chill: what have they done
to those sounds so layered once, thick

as paint applied straight from a palette,
each note now a needle
piercing, untouching, a set of cat’s
claws? Outside, in a cool
corner, light finds an old tom
curled among azaleas, his day dimmed.

Through a hairsbreadth opening of glass
the music is beautiful, it flows
along a fault line in the psyche
like a trickle on a hot day,
resolves, evaporates; what is harmony
but the sound of something leaving us,

the fleeting made audible?
Stay with us so, strangeness, signals
whistle-thin, colour no eye sees,
grow into the cry of a bird long
extinct, as we through song
become unearthly, a sky above cities.