Delta Boone The Archaeology of Staying

The Archaeology of Staying (Verse I) There's a photograph I never took of the way you held your coffee cup — both hands, like it might escape, like warmth was something that could leave before you finished with it. I've been thinking about that more than I think about God, more than I think about dying, which might mean they're the same thing, or might mean nothing at all. (Verse II) I drove through a town once where the gas station had been closed so long the weeds had made a kind of argument for something I didn't have the words for yet. Reclamation, maybe. Or just the patience of things that don't know they've been abandoned. (Chorus) And I wonder if that's what I am — a building the sky moved into when I stopped paying attention, roots in the cracks of me, something green where there used to be only the business of being a man. (Verse III) My father never cried in front of me but once I heard him in the garage talking to a carburetor the way priests talk to the ceiling — not asking for anything, just reporting. Here is what happened. Here is what I tried. Here is the part I don't understand. (Verse IV) I've carried sentences for years that never found their person. Not love letters — more like evidence. Proof that I was present. Proof that the window was open and the night came in and I noticed it, the way it tasted like somewhere else, like a life running parallel to mine just out of earshot, making decisions I keep second-guessing from this side of the wall. (Bridge) Maybe the blues isn't a feeling. Maybe it's a frequency — the hum behind every room after the conversation ends, after the door is closed with that particular softness that means no one is angry, just done. Maybe I've been living in that hum so long I started calling it home. (Final Verse) There's a word in Portuguese — saudade — that English never bothered learning because English was always trying to get somewhere. But I've been sitting still long enough to feel the shape of what's not here, to run my hands along the absence like a blind man reading the face of someone he already loves. (Outro) Somewhere a screen door swings on a house that forgot my name. Somewhere a carburetor holds a confession no one else will ever hear. And I am still that building — sky inside, roots in the concrete, green.