We Sing For You the Happy Children

A grey Saturday afternoon after a night of helplessness and broken bones. The words she says across the coffee table cut through my lacerated and rattled spirit like blow darts through flesh and for some reason all I can think of is the night in Olympia when they were waiting for my shift at the Y to be over in the stairwell to the massage room. I came bounding around the corner singing Toyland only to find her crying and him looking worried and instead of asking anything I waited outside on Franklin Street. It was winter, I think, and nighttime. The streets were wet with rain and under the cover of night they looked like symmetrical oil slicks, the sound of passing cars made me think of Miles Davis and taxi cabs when you’re in a city that doesn’t feel like home but you’re on some tour of duty that has only just started.

We lost something last February, and I wish like hell I knew how to get it back.

June will be here in two days, and then, and then, and then. There is this back porch and I’m sitting there on Division Street and we had just come in for the night and they are both together in that room that used to be a garage and he walks through the door and the feeling of infinite possibility invades absolutely every pore of me. It’s gone now, and I think it was packed somewhere in the U-Haul they took when I was still at SGS and realizing that the world will really cut you if you don’t have hard edges.

And the Russian children continue to sing.