The Stage
20 years.
Time distilling destination
to destiny, his face
a mirror. You sit in the dark
room pocked with strangers
as the songs travel your blood
and breath. The flame blows out
when the man walks by and you
are laughing too loud, writing
too small on cards that can not contain
what is moving through. Something old
something new. Something broken
something true. Filling pages the way
you fill your days waiting
for the music to begin.
He stands on stage, the god
they made, and you are drunk
on history. The words arrive in answer
to the ache and sink like stones
as the stem of your glass glitters
with piano and guitar. Every song
he’s ever written was for you
and every song you ever sang
was in answer. The cards stick
to the table. You hold his hair
in your fist in your mind, to keep
the idea of him fixed, the way you look
for him in the backs of the heads of men
turning away. Strange as this including room,
the high note of you tangles in his thrum of chord.
This skeleton of metaphor on which you string
your dim lanterns of contradiction.
Harmony the arc of light too beautiful to bridge.
