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I’M SORRY DIANE & LARA’S COAT from the collection “1988”
I’M SORRY DIANE I took the baby and the bathwater and I lost them in the fog. Punched a hole in your beehive and left the honey for the dogs. I offered you my kisses and charged interest on each one and promised they were weightless when they might have weighed a ton. And I was never any good, when I was your man
so I’m sorry, Diane. My eyes were keen as lasers and my heart demanded proof
I promised you every star but then left them on the roof and the house we shared the foundation laid with sand but I’m sorry, Diane. Send the children to my mother’s while you collect yourself I’ll be gone. I won’t need your help. So I swear I’ll write them letters and each month I’ll send a check I’ll teach them little hatreds
you’ll be unable to detect And I was never any good. And I never will. But still. But still.
Written by Ryan J. Tressel
RJT: All instruments
LARA’S COAT A prayer for Spring; rising mercury looms and the brides of Good Housekeeping sharpen their brooms and Lara leaves her coat on a hook in my room.
Carcasses of snowbanks slither to dark parts of lawns and the birds sing librettos to the face of the dawn and Lara walks home with no jacket on. The grass it grows greener, the sky deeper blue and the chimney makes noises: raccoons in the flu. And sleeves become shorter, the nights shorter, too. It’s there with the otter as they swim down the brook and it’s there in the maps of the weatherman’s petulant looks and it’s there in the dangling of Lara’s coat on my hook. And summer’s the scaffold and fall is the rope and winter’s a eulogy read by the pope. But spring, perhaps cruelly, is to give us our hope. That makes it easy to think as the winds come from the west and the skeleton trees begin budding new flesh that Lara’s coat might hang here forever, I guess.
Written by Ryan J. Tressel
RJT: All instruments
Recorded July 2007.
