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Present (The Remix)

uploaded: Sun, Sep 9, 2012 @ 6:46 AM last modified: Sun, Sep 9, 2012 @ 6:49 AM (add)

by	robwalkerpoet
Featuring	sLow_starteR
length	4:29
BPM	N/A
Recommends	Recommends (5)

present

.

The horizon is a mathematical line dividing an almost-white grey of air
and a silver-mirrored plane of fluid

there is a small bird flying high over Lake Alexandrina
a black dot moving like an arrow dividing

the eternity of a future ahead
and the infinite past behind

the black gift a mere
moving pinpoint

named

present

Background.
A few years back I was sitting in a conference centre in Goolwa, South Australia. A vast window pane looks onto Lake Alexandrina. I was thinking about a poem I’d just heard by Alex Skovron and another I’d read a few days earlier by Les Murray. Both were about the nature of time. The grey sky and lake were almost featureless until I saw a distant bird (possibly a very high pelican or lower-flying duck – difficult to say since it was just a dot.) Suddenly it seemed to me that this was the perfect trope for time itself; the infinite past and future and the present as an ever-moving point. A kind of geometrical representation of the fleeting nature of “now.”

It’s a brief poem, but particularly dense. I’ve remixed sLow starteR’s Strettona before, but this is a more perfect match, I think. A little like the early circular music of Steve Reich, or Australia’s The Necks. Mesmerising. At first you think it’s a loop, until you realise that it’s constantly transmographying into something else, just as the present continually morphs into the past.

After the “first round” I repeat the key words with long panning echoes so that the listener can really focus on the meaning and concept of each word (such as the two meanings of present.)

Happy listening.