Stephen Dobyns - What You Have Come to Expect lyrics

The worn plush of the seat chafes your bare legs as you shiver in the air-conditioned dark watching a man embrace his wife at the edge of their shadowy lawn. It is just past dusk and behind them their house rises white and symmetrical. Candles burn in each window, while from the open door a blade of light jabs down the gravel path to a fountain. In the doorway wait two children dressed for sleep in white gowns. The man touches his wife's cheek. Although he must leave, he is frightened for her safety and the safety of their children. At last he hurries to where two horses stamp and whinny in harness. Then, from your seat in the third row, you follow him through battles and bloodshed and friends lost until finally he returns home: rides up the lane as dusk falls to discover all that remains of his house is a single chimney rising from ashes and mounds of debris. Where is his young wife? He stares out across empty fields, the wreckage of stables and barns. Where are the children who were the comfort of his life? In a few minutes, you plunge into the brilliant light of the afternoon sun. Across the street, you see your bike propped against a wall with your dog waiting beside it. The dog is so excited to see you she keeps leaping up, licking your face, while you, still full of the movie, full of its color and music and lives sacrificed to some heroic heroic purpose, try to tell her about this unutterable sadness you feel on a Saturday afternoon in July 1950. Bicycling home, you keep question what happened to the children, what happened to their father standing by the burned wreckage of his house, and you wish there were someone to explain this problem to, someone to help you understand this sense of bereavement and loss: you, who are too young even to regret the pa**age of time. Next year your favorite aunt will die, then your grandparents, one by one, then even your cousins. You sit on the seat of your green bike with balloon tires and watch your dog waiting up the street: a Bayeux tapestry dog, brindle with thin legs and a greyhound chest, a dog now no more than a speck of ash in the Michigan dirt. From a distance of thirty years, you see yourself paused at the intersection: a thin blond boy in khaki shorts; clumsily entering your future the way a child urged on by its frightened nurse might stumble into a plowed field in the dead of night: half running, half pulled along. Behind them: gunshots, flame and the crack of burning wood. Far ahead, a black line of winter trees. Now, after thirty years, the trees have come closer. Glancing around you, you discover you are alone; raising your hands to your face and beard, you find you are no longer young, while the only fires are in the fleck of stars above you, the only face is the crude outline of the moon's: distant, as any family you might have had; cold, in a way you have come to expect.