Erica Jong - His Tuning Of The Night lyrics

All night he lies awake tuning the sky, tuning the night with its fat crackle of static, with its melancholy love songs crooning across the rainy air above Verdun & the autobahn's blue suicidal dawn. Wherever he lives there is the same unwomaned bed, the ashtrays overflowing their reproaches, his stained fingers on the tuning bar, fishing for her voice in a deep mirrorless pond, for the tinsel & elusive fish (brighter than pennies in water & more wished upon)- the copper-colored daughter of the pond god. He casts for her, the tuning bar his rod, but only long-dead lovers with their griefs haunt him in Piaf's voice- (as if a voice could somehow only die when it was sung out, utterly). He finally lies down and drowns the light but the taste of her rises, brackish, from the long dark water of her illness & his grief is terrible as drowning when he reaches for the radio again. In the daytime, you hardly know him; he walks in a borrowed calm. You cannot sense his desperation in the dawn when the abracadabras of the birds conjure another phantom day. He favors cities which blaze all night, hazy mushrooms of light under the blue & blinking eyes of jets. But when the lamps across the way go under, & the floorboards settle, & the pipes fret like old men gargling- he is alone with his mouthful of ghosts, his tongue bitter with her unmourned d**h, & the terrible drowning. I watch from my blue window knowing he does not trust me, though I know him as I know my ghosts, though I know his drowning, though, since that night when all harmony broke for me, I have been trying to tune the sky.