The second poem I wrote during Saturday’s concert… With acknowledgements to Terence Cuneo, I reproduce a crop of his painting Monmouth Castle.
17th September 2022
(St Mary’s Haverfordwest, Symphonica Tywi concert)
I do wonder this about the man:
When he conducts, does he stay a conductor?
Or is he transformed – trainsformed?
You see, railways are his confessed passion –
And railway journeys are all about rhythm, aren’t they?
So when he steps up does his maestro’s black, in his mind, dissolve?
Does he suddenly feel the easy loose fit of engineman’s cotton blue,
Can his fingers rub over the knobbly glints of BRITISH RAILWAYS buttons?
And is he smelling the coaly, oily, hot painty superaroma
Of an express loco’s cab?
In other words is this a musical footplate,
His baton an imagined regulator?
So those rail-running dots upon his score are really
Engine beat, machine roar, rapping rails:
Slow against gravity, fast on favourable gradients.
Because I can hear it: the steam locomotive
Chuffo dolce tiptoeing, or mortaring coal meteors to heaven, or drifting celeste-quiet
On the arm-raised orders of the signalman composer
With always the pistoning percussion, coupling rod double basses,
Restless valve-gear violins and violas,
Raucous chimneys of the brass,
Wheel-rumbling drums, whistling flutes…
As the miles and lovely Brunel-perfected miles of countryside
Pass on the vapour-spooling woodwind breeze.
Well, is he…? Let’s test him!
Let’s ask Mike Cottam, next concert, for Coronation Scot
Or The Night Mail – and check, afterwards,
If there are red hot cinders smouldering their way
Through his steam driver conductor’s cuffs!
… Or maybe more easily trap the truth by requesting
The Slow Train –
And see the uncontrollable flow of nostalgic tears.
© Christopher Jessop 2022
