Sarah Law lives in London, UK, and is a tutor for the Open University and elsewhere. She has five poetry collections and is widely published online. Her pamphlet My Converted Father, is published by Broken Sleep Books. She edits the online journal Amethyst Review.
*
Jazz with Diana
Is a shifting mood of chords
is dry ice evoking the smoke
of a joint in twenties Manhattan,
by night, by streetwise starlight. Is
a touch of freeform syncopation,
the old heart has quavered lately,
(still within the limits of its listening).
Is Miss Lonely Heart, sat at the bar
with her legs crossed and her hands
turning the glass of gimlet in
the low keyed evening, she
makes such a picture there, that he
remembers her silhouette ten years on,
the angle of her limbs and the sheen
of her blouse, and ambition’s
hazy scent. How its neat strength
becomes a sort of anodyne, a
riff on youth from those too aged
or wealthy to recall its rougher cuts,
now the stage lights mimic the sky
and even the floor is sprinkled with
what’s fallen. She’s at a grand piano,
letting the dream songs melt –
some are more borrowed than blue,
and settle like mist on a face, flung dew
as her head lifts up and fair hair
traces a verse for the parched;
even from this distance I can hear
time swinging, from the very last place
you look, as our hands are joined.
*
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