I sing to you
I sing to you, Geneviève
I sing to you
You don't exist
I sing to you, though
When I address you, who am I talking to?
Standing in the front yard like an open wound
Repeating I love you, to who?
I recorded all these songs about the weird echoes in our house now, then I walked out the door to play them on a stage
But I sing to you
I picture you
When we first met you were 22, and I drove my truck on to the ferry to Victoria in the morning where we met and talked forever in your apartment with evening falling, so I brought my blankets in and slept on the floor right next to your bed
In the morning barely awake, I saw you standing right above me; peeling and orange and looking hungry
"Do you want some?" you asked me, and then just avalanched into me with pieces of orange and (wait?) and kissing and certainty
I remember you a few days later in Tofino, where we'd driven to play a show you'd set up for us at a surf shop to no one, then we slept in the back of my truck and got woken up by the cops, then went down to the fishing boat dock to ask whoever for a ride across the water to Meares Island to just get left there for the day, and we did that and brought some food to eat and went through the big trees abandoned and in love, totally insane, apart from the rest of the world
We had finally found each other in the universe
Lying on the rocks, waiting for the boat to come pick us up, I read the one book we had with us aloud, with my head on your lap, sinking to you
Tintin in Tibet in French
And we thought of devotion, and snow, and distant longing, and the Himalayan air high and told with a bell ringing out
Then right before you died 13 years later in our house I remember through your gasping for oxygen, you explained that you'd been thinking about that high, cold air wrapping the globe, singing above the mountains of the Gods
And yes I do picture you there
Molecules dancing
But still I'd rather you were in the house watching the unfolding everyday life of this good daughter we made, instead of being scattered by the wind for no reason
So I sing to you