The Decemberists – On the Bus Mall
from Picaresque (2005) /twinkly folkpop/
Among all the urchins and old Chinese merchants
of the old town,
we reigned at the pool hall
with one iron cue ball
and we never let the bastards get us down.
And we laughed off the quick tricks–
the old men with limp dicks–
on the colonnades of the waterfront park.
As 4 in the morning came on, cold and boring,
we huddled close
in the bus stop enclosure enfolding.
Our hands tightly holding.
The sky, its majestic blue and spires of clouds, was wiped out by the pissing rain. Pouring over us and everything, leaving barely a space to form words or compute thoughts. Spatial relations, divisions between objects lost their meaning in the solid wash of water. Her scuffed flannel shirt was battered into a sodden dissolving sponge, as if each thread sought some place to crawl away to but found none.
Not ten feet to her left, the awning claimed to offer a shelter. She shied toward it on alternating minutes, but I held her away: my hand and its rain clamped fast upon her hand and the same rain. My eyes desparately sought hers, but the sheet of waters separated us like television static. The dull reflecting of it sent images of the past to both of us. She saw the pain, the interminability, failures and dastards. I saw small fragments of our precarious existence, tied together by a tenuous cord that was always the same. She. My only companion through the storm. She saw an end. I saw my own hope, and the absolute necessity.
I stood long, every muscle and joint tensing, hoping that through the curtain between us, she could see how my eyes implored. I vowed then never to let go, and in a way I haven’t.