stages

She latches on to the artist young. Everybody knows how it goes.

She imagines herself growing up with him, with his songs.

Growing seems safer that way.

In the early days she pictures pecking at his mouth in the shadowed angles of velvet wings, her fingers in his back pockets, a murmuring just outside.

A few years later,

rowdier, bristling,

the silvery static crackle of plug-in:

antsy crowds, handsy moments in dressing rooms.

There must be, she thinks, a lot of looking over shoulders. Heady, high drama, betrayal at the drop of a hat.

Skim through the succeeding years,

the eyeliner and the impatience and the shouting matches with and without spectators,

as her fingertip skims over plastic sleeves, the snap satisfying

like no man she’s had.

Moons wax and wane,

in his work, outside.

She was raised in the land of bread and circuses and she can take it.

His is the voice

she listens to the night after she crosses the stage, the face

she sees on the pink papered wall of her best friend’s bathroom one stiff summer morning, the hand

she tries to hold in the waiting room,

so tight she makes her own hands clammy.

He is the remains of fortunes

that rise and fall,

the sole surety.

She pictures being older together, wondering whether motion or stillness is the true curse.

His prayers in her mouth, the quietest kind of happy she can hope for,

and room left for one wish:

that, when she reaches whatever destination there is, he be waiting with a melancholy look and a final tune for her to sing brokenly along to.