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Under the Radio

Alex Saynor

Friday, December 15th, 2023

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 She was talking to me under the radio,
under the Saturday food programme
guests cautioned against innuendo

2 Leave a comment on verse 2 0 who went for humour in unlikely combos
while eyes sank lower above the wheel.
If anything can combine, list anything.

3 Leave a comment on verse 3 0 In two hundred yards, bear left to turn right.
The Plough is above in the day’s sky
and before, as an implausible roundabout

4 Leave a comment on verse 4 0 where the first exit to St Alban’s
requires a turning to the right
on a roundabout within a roundabout

5 Leave a comment on verse 5 0 way of saying: ‘You may end up
in Hemel Hempstead against your will today.’

6 Leave a comment on verse 6 0 She was talking to me under the radio
joke intonations that dip in the sentence
under the aeroplane fuel of Bedfont.

7 Leave a comment on verse 7 0 Are satellite voices mixed with your app
for air traffic, so we don’t know if we’re u-turning
or the approach is clear for a Colnbrook landing?

8 Leave a comment on verse 8 0 She was talking to me under the radio
traffic despatches we could have predicted.
Driving down South Africa Road today

9 Leave a comment on verse 9 0 at ten-to-three is best avoided,
as is Caversham Bridge and Reading
from every direction: the Radio Berkshire

10 Leave a comment on verse 10 0 traffic report should just play ‘shambolic tailback’
on a loop so Mandy can relax with a coffee.
She was talking to me under the radio

11 Leave a comment on verse 11 0 overlay of mumblings. Were we really
now having to travel up through Barnes
only to be stranded on the Chiswick Eyot?

12 Leave a comment on verse 12 0 She was talking to me under the radio
talk on Western Sahara. In the sirocco winds,
body and face covered entirely, wearing sunglasses,

13 Leave a comment on verse 13 0 there’s a garbled chat in Moroccan Arabic,
but it’s hard to read the body language.
Beyond disorientated, off the ait

14 Leave a comment on verse 14 0 now the sun has lost its midday reference
at the zenith to a dusk of shallow silence,
the voice is one of clear direction

15 Leave a comment on verse 15 0 removed from a disordered palimpsest.
‘Follow the Beverley Brook to Mayflower Wetlands’
is as sharp as it gets above the radio background

16 Leave a comment on verse 16 0 phenomena of scrambled contexts.
Would you call it fate, now, or the universe,
a divine nudge, random voice or inner compass?

17 Leave a comment on verse 17 0 It’s a signal received and another tuned out,
waves modulated one end, receiver adjusted
at this. Now within the radius wheel beams

18 Leave a comment on verse 18 0 something extra spoke from up above
in low earth orbit or over the ground
from a random tuning in

19 Leave a comment on verse 19 0 to waves beyond our line of sight
amplified from distant radio horizons
and we seemed to know the way to go

20 Leave a comment on verse 20 0 as voices emerge by Heston, Bagshot,
Hangar Lane, Sunbury and Handy Cross,
The Plough again or Seven Stars,

21 Leave a comment on verse 21 0 Ravenscourt Park, and we find a way again
through interference, stranded time on ice
behind our goal in Gretzky’s Zone

22 Leave a comment on verse 22 0 and cross-multiplied voices under the radio.

Notes

This is about finding it difficult to follow the sat- nav to the ground as it seems to fade in and out of the radio. It is based on a specific trip last season to Fulham which led us through unfamiliar territory south of the river – mainstream radio traffic reports state the obvious (South Africa Rd is the road immediately outside the Kiyan Prince Foundation Stadium, home of QPR. Do we really need to know it may be busy at around 3pm, or – conversely – that a trunk road north of Crewe is particularly troublesome?), while the programmed-in sat-nav struggles to make its voice heard or give us enough notice to make the required turns, we ultimately need to rely on an inner compass or intuition to get to the ground in time.

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/under-the-radio/