That’s the Song

“Do you know any song about staying/not going? One that makes your heart by way of breaking it?”

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Dear Alex,

Do I know of any song? A song to “sit this one out”, stay inside our navels, pressed between ribs, cleaving the heart to heal it.

Is there such a song?

My problem is not finding the song but the song finding its voice on tongue. To know a song, you need to be known by the song.

Now this sounds silly: how does a song know you? It’s just a tune, a cough of notes, naked and witless, listless in fever, surging off chart, rhythm gone viral.

As millions stay inside, quarantined by the staying power of an invisible tone, the little song sneaks up to you, whispers within 6 feet, knows your habits from 3 decades afar. To you it comes airborne.

This sounds more senseless. An exaggeration. I am seasoned and smart, scientifically sound, homebound and safe. I know of no song other than the one I have been singing all my life - hallelujah, blessed, fearless. That’s me. That’s today.

Out of bounds and off key comes Robert Frost, 1922:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year

Frost was a poet, not a researcher or an epidemiologist. We all know that. And this now we know more of technology and humanity and intuition. That’s today. His days were about woods and horses. Let’s be rational here - a song with or without. A voice or tune we need to “sit this one out” and to stay in so to come out sooner.

Farmhouses.

Village.

Watch.

Stopping here.

Worlds so remote yet crammed, cross-cultural and genders and genres crossing and cutting still through the woods and lakes from the darkest evening to the next morning - keynotes come to us from old world tomorrow set in songs we sing now. That’s today.

Yours, Kate