Winter Phase: A Still Night’s A-Wailing For You

A Still Night’s A-Wailing For You

Well, you’re pacing the kitchen
Stitch-popped from bitching
With no one to pitch it all to
‘Cept a bottle of bad news over a cold cup of coffee
That keeps the bed from putting on its moves
Cause you don’t want to sleep with these thoughts in your head
Her face is tattooed underneath your eyelids
And this is not the first time that you’ve said
All the things that you penned on the pen on the pad by the phone
That you can’t seem to pick up because you’re not all at home
And you’re scared that she’s not home at all…
So you wonder if the snow’s ceased to fall

* * *

You hear a wail from outside
So you open the slide-
-ing glass door that leads out the back
And you turn on the light and broadcast is the night
With oak woods like silk stocking’ed legs
And the sound is of cattle from across the far hill
In the still quiet air that you smoke from its chill
Like skates on a pond glide each shrill
And can’t figure it out: why they cry now so late?
Is this slaughter or some predator?
Neither reason holding much water

(Chorus)
Oh the scream of a bobcat
The yelp of a dog
A woman’s faint crying
Left a dim dream sweat-soaked
And a still nights a-wailing
A still night’s a-wailing
A still night’s a-wailing for you

Then again ‘round the kitchen
But this monkey ain’t quitting
And your shoulders are stiff from its claws
You know you’re looking for trouble with sand in your eyes
As you slip on your overcoat and boots in the hall
And you know you should call but you don’t know the number
The names of your neighbors… your memory like rubber
Besides your blood is getting stale from hunger
From this rigmarole of losing your hold and your love
Just waiting for the sun to get up
And your legs they are fit for a walk

(Repeat chorus)

The luminescent night snow
Giving its ghostly glow
Tis a neitherworld you wander in
To a sound shroud in death from your burnt birdcage wreck
You pass through the glassy field’s opening
And the clouds overhead move time-lapsed on a screen
Rear projected to enhance this otherworldly scene
But your eyes are two adrift children leaving
Like a pale skin of slow cooling embers you grow
But the still night is still wailing for you
And the barn door lay open and hewed

You feel an off gravity
At the dark cavity
This unwelcoming silent doorway
It’s swallowing your sight up a trapezoid of light
Where the moon peeks its head in the frame
And not a wail do you hear now nor any trace of life
All appears long abandoned under a drop cloth of ice
Rotting behind the sea of time’s leaky dike
And tightening are the knots in your stomach with thoughts
As the wailing comes now from your home
And never have you felt so alone

(Repeat chorus)

Oh, a still night’s a-wailing
A still night’s a-wailing
A still night’s a-wailing for you