The little house was boarded up.

He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to see. It was summer now and hotter than you’d expect but it had been the end of winter then. Spring had been so close. You couldn’t feel it. But you could see it on the calendar.

A week before it happened, he’d been out to see her.

They sat in her little parlor.

An antique painting of a frozen lake hung over a low fire in a stone fireplace, but her gaze was on the icey lake twenty or thirty yards beyond the unfogged glass of the parlor window.

Neither of them said anything for a half hour. He looked in her eyes for a few seconds. It seemed like the first time in the whole visit. He hugged her tentatively as he got up to leave, feeling uncomfortable yet really wanting to hang on to her, try to pull her into the room with him. But he let her go with what he meant to be a jaunty sort of wave and she smiled a little and, for just a moment, really a tiny sliver of time, her blue eyes came alive and he knew they were there, together, maybe just for that instant.

She walked out onto the porch with him. The air was cold and wet, the sky an undifferentiated gray. She smiled again, but her gaze was over his shoulder.

Thinking about how they’d walked, drunkenly, one clear mid-winter night years before onto the ice, he’d said, “Looks like spring is right around the corner. Don’t you be going out for a walk on that ice. I don’t want to get some telegram when I get back to the city.”

Now, in the summer, he stood on the porch. The only thing that could possibly be bluer than the lake was the sky. Scrub birds chirped busily in the brush and a woodpecker hammered at a distant tree.

He stood, looking out across the lake for a very long time.

This version of this song’s a bit shaky, even by AYoS standards (I have a preset macro for pasting the phrase even by AYoS standards into my blog entries, by the way) but it reflects the restless evolution of this song as it struggles toward self-actualization.

previous versions
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Wednesday, February 22, 2006

lyrics
When Baby Can’t Go On

When Baby can’t go on
she wont wonder why
you open up the bottle
and go home when its dry
when the darkeness hits the dawn
and the ocean meets the sky
there’s never in her “always”
and forever in her “goodbye”

baby lived forever
for almost thirty years
then she sailed away one day
on a ship of frozen tears

baby had a house those days
way up the shore
we all knew that she was hiding
but we never knew what for

baby lived forever…

the last time i saw her
i knew it was her time
there was sadness in her laughter
and a long-way-off in her eyes

baby lived forever
for almost thirty years
then she sailed away one day
on a ship of frozen tears

1998-08-06
(C)2008, TK Major