The moon rose above the trees, older than time, greener than money. You hung your head out the window of our dusty lemon yellow El Camino and howled, and I turned up the raido, because the sound of your voice was alreayd begining to get to me. The speakers crackled and the music came through: Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Pretty as a midsummer's mourn, they call her Dawn. Let the love of God come and get us if it wants us so bad. We know where we are going when all of this is done.
Some people might say that buying a house you've never actually seen close-up is a bad idea, but what does anybody know abotu our, needs anyhow? For us it was perfect. The peeling paint. The old cellar. The garden in the back. The porch out front. The still air of the living room. The attic. Everywhere entirely unfurnished and doomed to remain largely so, save for our own meager offerings: a cheap sofa, an old mattress, a couple of chairs and some ashtrays. maybe a table salvaged from some diner gone into bankruptcy, I don't remember. Neither do you. We drank store-brand gin with fresh lime juice out of plastic cups, or straight from the bottle and we spread ourselves out face-up on the wooden floors. An aerial view of us might have suggested we'd been knocked down, but what we were doing was staking our claim. Establishing our territories. Making good. Not on the vows we'd made but on the ones we'd really meant. You produced a wallet sized transistor radio out of nowhere and you found a sympathertic station: somebody was playing Howlin' Wolf. Smokestack Lightning. O yes, I loved you once. O yes, you loved me more.
