Under the Radio

She was talking to me under the radio,
under the Saturday food programme
guests cautioned against innuendo

who went for humour in unlikely combos
while eyes sank lower above the wheel.
If anything can combine, list anything.

In two hundred yards, bear left to turn right.
The Plough is above in the day’s sky
and before us as an implausible roundabout

where the first exit to St Alban’s
requires a turning to the right
on a roundabout within a roundabout

way of saying: ‘You may end up
in Hemel Hempstead against your will today.’

She was talking to me under the radio
joke intonations that dip in the sentence
under the aeroplane fuel of Bedfont.

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?

She was talking to me under the radio
traffic reports we could have predicted.
Driving down South Africa Road today

at ten-to-three is best avoided,
as is Caversham Bridge and Reading
from every direction: the Radio Berkshire

traffic report should just say ‘solid’ or ‘problematic’
so Mandy can relax with a coffee.
She was talking to me under the radio

overlay of mumblings. Were we really
now having to travel up through Barnes
only to be stranded on the Chiswick Eyot?

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

there’s a garbled chat in Moroccan Arabic,
but it’s hard to read the body language.
Beyond disorientated, off the ait

now the sun has lost its midday reference
at the zenith to a dusk of shallow silence,
the voice is one of clear direction

removed from a disordered palimpsest.
‘Follow the Beverley Brook to Mayflower Wetlands’
is as sharp as it gets above the radio background

phenomena of scrambled contexts.
Would you call it fate, now, or the universe,
a divine nudge, random voice or inner compass?

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

something extra speaks from up above
in low earth orbit or over the ground
from a random tuning in

to waves beyond our line of sight
amplified from distant radio horizons
and we seem to know the way to go

as voices emerge by Heston, Bagshot,
Hangar Lane, Sunbury and Handy Cross,
The Plough again or Seven Stars,

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

and cross-multiplied voices under the radio.