Note Blue

or Poem for Eighties Babies (~also for T. P., 1950-2010) If it's Teddy singing it—don't leave me this way—it isn't the arrangement your parents spun themselves through, becoming another strobe-lit dervish. Listen as it pounds. Think of them instead not dancing but stilled in a corner, buttressed by their own sweat and clairvoyant uncertainty. Every plea, every atonement that reaches sweet and hard from Teddy's vocal folds, is ambivalent toward their present, its travails—the night humid, reduced to tissue paper's fragility. It's June 1976, years before code like mother and father—before either is prepared to admit they could not imagine the uphill slope of love after disco's tongue licked the vinyl unfurrowed and the babies —babies that began as mere pheromone exchanges on a dance floor— began falling into their young laps. It isn't your fault. You did not stop the music. Or if you did, it was Thelma Houston's cover, not this bearded prayer of negative capability— the pleaseplease under each pace your parents took beyond the cusp of realizing nothing so good could stay that good so long.