‘This Feeling’ by Alabama Shakes — An Ode

Sometimes when I’m feeling down,
which can happen in the early hours after midnight,
I’ll open my laptop and look for that particularly
nice thing you said about my picture on Instagram
and I’ll read it over several times — carefully.

Sometimes in the middle of night
when all the Facebook posts are sleeping,
looking sweet and innocent,
I’ll creep in so as not to disturb them
and add a brief note with a link to a video,
like the one on Youtube by Alabama Shakes,
close the lid and lie in the dark, see the singer
brimming, her whole soul showing,
hear the song in my head until it fades, and
before I sleep I think how different she is from me,
and wonder if she’d agree to a coffee.

Sometimes when I rise at 4 AM and leave
the warmth of the beautiful sleeper beside me
I’ll find my chair in front of the dark window
and open my Spotify playlist, the one I’ve named Red Tree,
full of slow melancholy instrumentals that have titles
like, Nest and It Feels like Floating and Moonbow
and it’s as though I’ve been given a warm blanket
to throw over my troubled spirit;

and that’s when I think of the morning I rode
my bicycle to work at the Alberta Wheat Pool
in late fall: fog had settled over dawn and above the sound
of bike tires rolling over gravel
I hear the soft pounding of hooves coming from the ditch
and at the curve by the marsh
I make out the slender shapes of white-tail deer
running with me, sailing over slough grass
and I race and they keep pace
then explode ahead of me and scatter across the stubble field
like dark purple flares flying.
“That’s the morning,” I’ll say over coffee to the woman
from Alabama Shakes, “I had that same feeling.”