MindSpinner

It’s a done deal. Tickets are on the way. A room has been reserved at a Holiday Inn in Indianapolis. Dark-haired daughter, two of her friends and I are headed to a mewithoutYou concert on the 27th. Now I will get to hear in person the people who sing the songs that are constantly playing on the car CD player, courtesy of my offspring, who are appalled to discover that I now know all the lyrics and can sing along.

Mom singing lyrics can make songs decidedly less cool. Do you suppose resident mewithoutYou fans know that lead singer Aaron Weiss and guitarist Mike Weiss are both English majors licensed to teach that subject in the state of Pennsylvania? Perhaps not.

Of all the mewithoutYou songs we listen to while driving from here to there, the one that sticks in my head is this one. I like it, except for the ending, for the images and the lilt of the words and music.

In a sweater poorly knit, and an unsuspecting smile
Little Moses drifts downstream in the Nile
A fumbling reply — an awkward, rigid laugh
I’m carried helpless by my floating basket raft

Your flavor in my mind swings back and forth between,
sweeter than any wine, and bitter as mustard greens
Light and dark as honeydew and pumpernickle bread
The trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead

As you plow some other field, try and forget my name,
see what harvest yields, and, supposing I’d do the same
I planted rows of peas, but by the first week of july –
they should have come up to my knees but they were maybe ankle high

Take the fingers from your flute to weave your colored yarns,
and boil down your fruit to preserves in mason jars
But now the books are overdue and the goats are underfed…
the trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead

You’re a door-without-a-key, a field-without-a-fence
You made a holy fool of me, and I’ve thanked you ever since
If she comes circling back, we’ll end where we’d begun
Like two pennies on the train track the train crushed into one

Or if I’m a crown without a king, if I’m a broken, open seed
If I come without a thing, I come with all I need
No boat out in the blue, no place to rest your head
The trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead

I
do
not
exist
only
you
exist