Note Blue

or Poem for Eighties Babies

(~also for T. P., 1950-2010)

If it's Teddy singing it—don't leave me

this way—it isn't the arrangement

your parents spun themselves through,

becoming another strobe-lit dervish. Listen

as it pounds. Think of them instead

not dancing but stilled in a corner,

buttressed by their own sweat

and clairvoyant uncertainty. Every plea,

every atonement that reaches sweet

and hard from Teddy's vocal folds,

is ambivalent toward their present,

its travails—the night humid, reduced to tissue

paper's fragility. It's June 1976, years before

code like mother and father—before either

is prepared to admit they could not imagine

the uphill slope of love after disco's

tongue licked the vinyl unfurrowed and the babies

—babies that began as mere pheromone

exchanges on a dance floor—

began falling into their young laps.

It isn't your fault. You did not stop the music.

Or if you did, it was Thelma Houston's cover,

not this bearded prayer of negative capability—

the pleaseplease under each pace your parents took

beyond the cusp of realizing nothing so good

could stay that good so long.

Source: Honest Engine (University of Georgia Press, 2015)