Today's poem is by David Keplinger & Bruce Bond

2 poems
       

Voicemail from the B Side of the Record

Those grooves of a song never played
or listened to will hold the music
nevertheless. Everything does. The voice

of the unconceived child; the unplanted
Live Oak seed; the idea of the manifest enough
to awaken awe, though it is no thing

at all. Bruce, there is another kind of needle
crackle, too, where the voice passes through
the wires of the arm and the speaker's

mouth. Which one's the exile, and which at home?
Is the manifest home? Or that which never came?

Voicemail from a Juke at the Bar

I love that song. The composition, as if
time were a cigarette in the bar room
air, when the hand goes still to listen.

My shelves sag with tracks that bend
into an eye. Like the David I imagine,
I nicked the vinyl as I pulled the needle

from its vein, to play the solo once again.
I got old this way, as did my records, my
love, but the music in the mist remained

as space does in the path of time, or black
in the beam of a nameless star, otherwise unseen.

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Copyright © 2023 David Keplinger & Bruce Bond All rights reserved
from Kestrel
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission