Acoustics
by Bryan Borland
More than your shirt and your dog I knew
when you left your guitar you’d return
This was in the early days of us
before the certainty of Sunday morning coffee
Now when I come home from work
I am learning not to think it’s the radio
I am schooling myself the proper response
when you potion my day into song
I study the science of your voice
the geometry of chords cradled by your throat
the angles that retract with words
you must read again and again the same
as you read a new lover’s body to learn why it shakes
when he is not cold or how his chapped lips betray him
in smile or how his legs go rigid just before sleep
or how it’s of no use to question while he plays
I fall into bed wearing sheet music on my bare chest
You make clefs from tufts of my hair.