From It’s Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems, published by Freehand Books in 2008.
(later)
A record is a palimpsest, an incest of sound. A drill-bit riding a carousel at midnight. The world’s most whopping layer cake. Not even the piggiest piglets among you can ever eat your way to the bottom. The backtracks have backtracks. Sound behind sound behind sound. Rave all you want about your good ears, they’ll never reach her record’s acoustic back country and what a blessing—Buddy Rich is calling her a bitch, there, a limey broad. That human thud you can’t hear is old Ida Metzger sailing onto Dusty’s roadster’s hood. Then there’s wretched blubbering Mary O’Brien won’t that bloody cow stop and a myriad of other frequencies you’re not picking up— the clanking of eyelashes finale of teacups hitting the wall Martha Reeves howling as sardines fly into her exquisite cocoa collarbones. You can’t hear any of this.