Can we fix it? / Yes we can!

I'm like everybody else - fragments of songs, words and tunes, pass continually through my mind. Sometimes I recognise them, sometimes not. Perhaps they are very old, as old as the species; perhaps not. It's hard to say. They might be from some kid's show I used to see when my boys were little and I still lived with them. If they become too insistent, and if I can find the song among the cds, I'll play it as a way of laying the ghost. Or not - given air, it may persist past distraction. There's a bird on the witch's spike at the top of the spire: like a bird on a wire ... under louring skies. Should that be lowering. Flying the black flag of himself. In the grey light of dawn, when the frogs are just quieting and the koels, the currawongs or some other corvid begin to make their exploratory morning calls, I'm liable to host lines of verse, not random, not unknown: Desolate is the crow's puckered cry, I'll think. As an old woman's mouth / When the eyelids have finished / And the hills continue ... Lines can come unbidden at any hour; or are they bidden, or biddable? Why am I subject to these invasions? A lifetime of listening, yes, of reading; but still. As the dull gunshot and its after-râle / Among conifers, in rainy twilight. Since I have been reading Colin Tudge's The Secret Life of Trees, they, the trees, look different to me. Look differently at me. Xylem and phloem, I say to myself, when I see their beautiful variety growing around the oval of the local park. Chlorophyll. Stomata. What is the music of trees? Sentient, surely; but not. Or are they? Silent? No. Unless the wind is. He speaks of meeting trees. Sometimes, not often, he gets their names wrong: I only know this when he's writing about the Aotearoans. This afternoon, at NV, lunching with a friend, I had the rare luxury of saying out loud the words in my head: To want nothing is / The only possible freedom ... And then the next bit, that reduces me almost to tears, which I don't shed, but tears anyway: But I prefer to think of / An afternoon spent drinking rum and cloves / In a little bar, just after the rain had started, in another time / Before we began to die ... It doesn't matter, but those lines always return me to the Queens Ferry in Vulcan Lane, Auckland, which I think they are about. And that in turn sends me back to when I was so much younger, younger than today, and I might or might not have drunk, not rum and cloves, but beer, in the same pub. Or the one next door, whose name I can't now remember: ... the taste of boredom on the tongue / Easily dissolving, and the lights coming on - / With what company? I forget ... And so it goes, day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, a song in the head, a fragment of a poem always at the lip of speech. This Buick's a Century, '73 like you / Some strange religion ... Or: The voice I hear this passing night was heard / In ancient days by emperor and clown ... Or: Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing ... And: