Liner Notes

Because this song’s made of the airwaves

a time machine, you start to play the air

guitar of memory, making a country

so you can walk back into it, like a man

on rewind in a silent film, his whiskey tumbler

filling up again as he rises from his stool

and steps backwards towards the avenue, where

the cars, cabs, trucks reverse away from him,

and the lights, for once, turn amber to green;

where the two hands on his watch unravel time,

like a maiden aunt unpicking a whole evening’s worth

of knitting over the dropped stitch that means

she must go back before she can go on.

You raise the record from its sleeve again,

hold it grail-like into the wayward light

to read the liner notes on a life you’ve lived

all wrong. Wind in the sycamores outside,

rain coming down in a town you left behind

and not this one, where the backward longing

can strike you anytime — breath on the nape

of your neck when you’re the only one in line,

cat with a broken spine dragging itself off

into the undergrowth to die. Where the silence

might give way to a high-hat or snare drum,

the lub-dub of the bass, a brass section.

After a long absence, you take up the thread again,

take up the line, what you listen for,

try not to listen for, stirring the tiny hairs

within your inner ear, weighting the wet tip

of your tongue, like the scuff and fumble

of the blind needle finding its way from silence

to the first track on side one. You nod

your head “yes.” You sing along. You tap

the steering wheel of the car in which you pass

under a strobe of stars, a quarter moon,

until, despite yourself, you are sixteen

again and walking home in a downpour

with your Ken Dodd quiff, your flowers of sulfur,

toward the box of records from which you’ll pick

a tune to name the afternoon. Its scattered

showers with a chance of sunny spells later,

its gust and bluster from Rathlin to Cape Clear.

This one would sound good in a stadium.

It’s all guitar shimmer, tremolo arm,

a chorus that staggers smitten toward

the open bar. This one’s a plea, a paean

on just six strings until the horns cut in,

like the bully at a prom. It recalls the taste

of cigarettes and bubblegum on the tongue

of the first girl you ever kissed. All broken glass

and bruised finger, its swoon circles forever

the turntable in that blue room where you

fed and watered every slight and scar. And so

you’d like to thank the engineer, his assistant

who provides the harmonies and made the tea;

the trumpet player, his spit still wet in the mouth

of a solo that the vinyl keeps pristine,

black box recorder to your submerged plane.

The singer with a bone stuck in her throat,

which is another way to say “longing.”

The producer, who fills in on Hammond organ.

You could go on like this, lost in the noise

again, in your baroque joy at what was

and is, and what the words become, talking

to yourself in the second person, as if

you’re fooling anyone, reading the liner notes

on a life you measure song by song.