You know how a song can start—slow—how it can work its way under your shirt, move up your spine, spread its fingers across the base of your neck, send a shower of blue sparks up and over your skull, smooth over the lines on your forehead, open your two eyes, slide in through the gates, and flower in the beds at the back of your mind; and then, like the first flush of red wine, you taste something like gratitude, and you smell release, and you step out of the asylum like it was never locked from the outside, and you peel off your two-piece ambition suit and sit cross-legged in the park, uncased, by the fountain, wearing your white dragon-stone-print fedora, looking crazy-naïve, wondering when the last time was you dared to wear it—dared a flamboyance that finally turned unconscious because you tilted your head—drawn to the flame, warm, and the fountain, wet; and in the park, you sat like you invented it, sat with anyone because at bottom you were everyone—a shooting blue spark among a Roman candle of blue sparks, and as you flew up, the things you saw, you’d tell, not like a tale that is told without ache or innocence, but like tending baby chicks in a cardboard box, like the time you saw a mourning dove on a country drive while listening to a new song; and playing it over, hearing the meadow moan and feeling the stream strum you, all the slow movement, moving up your spine, a second time, like the first, but not exactly like the first, because nothing repeats, and nothing is the same since you let go of the sure thing that was never yours and never sure, and fell backwards, arms out, eyes closed.
Make sure you go to Dana’s CD release party, June 26, at Holy Trinity, Edmonton.
