We were singing- it must have
been Ed Sheeran or John Mayer,
it was poetic almost,
requiring a resistance of rise and fall of perfect and
precise execution as our voice’s
moved
into the next song without
stopping, two voice’s achieving a rise
“above a seven-league
stride—such perfect agony,
one learns to smile through,”
perfectly in-sync
being a goal of many, a vision
of American Perfect.
And because I was distracted
by the effort of
keeping pitch
( the ups , downs, highs, lows
hearing your voice enough to
cross my heart, smiling, smiling)
I didn’t notice how quiet you’d become
until we had done it
(for two measures?three?four?five even?)
-achieved flight,
a swiftly composed
harmony,
“before the earth
remembered who we were
and brought us down.”