Lyrics

Ten years since we were married, since we stood under a chuppah of pine boughs in the middle of a little pinewood and exchanged our wedding vows. Save me, good thou, a piece of marchpane, while I fill your glass with Simi Chardonnay as high as decency allows, and then some. Bear with me now as I myself must bear the scrutiny of a bottle of wine that boasts of hints of plum and pear, its muscadine tempered by an oak backbone. I myself have designs on the willow-boss of your breast, on all your waist confines between longing and loss. The wonder is that we somehow have withstood the soars and slumps in the Dow of ten years of marriage and parenthood, its summits and its sloughs— that we've somehow managed to withstand an almond-blossomy five years of bitter rapture, five of blissful rows (and then some if we count the one or two to spare when we've been firmly on cloud nine). Even now, as you turn away from me with your one bare shoulder, the veer of your neckline, I glimpse the all-but-cleared-up eczema patch on your spine and it brings to mind not the Schloss that stands, transitory, tra la, Triestine, between longing and loss but a crude hip trench in a field, covered with pine boughs, in which two men in masks and hoods who have themselves taken vows wait for a farmer to break a bale for his cows before opening fire with semi- automatics, cutting him off slightly above the eyebrows, and then some. It brings to mind another, driving out to care for six white-faced kine finishing on heather and mountain air, another who'll shortly divine the precise whereabouts of a land mine on the road between Beragh and Sixmilecross, who'll shortly know what it is to have breasted the line between longing and loss. Such forbearance in the face of vicissitude also brings to mind the little "there, theres" and "now, nows" of two sisters whose sleeves are imbued with the constant douse and souse of salt water through their salt house in Matsukaze (or Pining Wind), by Zeami, the salt house through which the wind soughs and soughs, and then some of the wind's little "now, nows" and "there, theres" seem to intertwine with those of Pining Wind and Autumn Rain, who must forbear the dolor of their lives of boiling down brine. For the double meaning of "pine" is much the same in Japanese as English, coming across both in the sense of "tree" and the sense we assign between "longing" and "loss" as when the ghost of Yukihira, the poet-courteir who wooed both sisters, appears as a ghostly pine, pining among pine boughs. Barely have Autumn Rain and Pining Wind renewed their vows than you turn back toward me, and your blouse, while it covers the all-but-cleared-up patch of eczema, falls as low as decency allows, and then some. Princess of Accutane, let's no more try to refine the pure drop from the dross than distinguish, good thou, between mine and thine, between longing and loss, but rouse ourselves each dawn, here on the shore at Suma, with such force and fervor as spouses may yet espouse, and then some. ~