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The Closer You Get
to Leaving-the country song I fashion, then unravel- pines for a voice as nettled as Loretta's, for fingers destined to travel the guitar's fragile neck, fretting his cheatin' steps from honky tonk to home. "Ever since you left me" takes lonesome for granted and downs another of whatever handsome's pouring. O to languish in such rich aftermath, such bathrobe- till-happy-hour-hair-of-the-dog extravagance. Instead, the closer you get to leaving the quicker I weave a web of whisper- thin beginnings: listless riverbank kiss, a drifting glimpse, now weeks upstream from the closer you get to love. The closer you hold me the sooner leaving moves its gerund feet, sleepwalking, shedding like bedclothes the careless pretense of a noun. When I try to lay down the requisite rails, the very lines I cannot follow, my town deletes itself from your horizon. Leaving picks up steam, its engine coughing fewer lost goodbyes the smaller I get from gone.