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on a late spring day, when summer began to take shape, |
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you lowered your head to bear an uneven compromise. |
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how your voice held steel, make sharp by the sound of it aloud! |
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you were drunk on each syllable; you could not even hear what it sang. |
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when you were young, you spent your summers in maine. |
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and stripped of the friends you made, |
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you gorged yourself on frost and hemingway. |
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when you came back to michigan, |
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you would walk with words you did not speak |
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and dress yourself with an air we couldn't reach. |
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so when you go back to maine, i hope that you stay |
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(where you have corned truth and beauty). |
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and each borrowed refrain you sing, you sing, |
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you sing will sound the same to the lonely, lonely sea. |
