When I read the prompt today on the NaPoWriMo website, to write a poem about listening to or singing a song while driving, incorporating a lyric quote somewhere in the piece, and I read the example poem by Ellen Bass, I knew immediately what song I would write about. And shortly thereafter I also knew that I had written about this song before, maybe even somewhere on the blog site here. Sure enough, all I had to do was search the site for the title of the song and it came up right away. I had written about it in a kind of hybrid music-review-memoir series I’d been working on in 2015, ten years ago, and what I had written about the song then was almost precisely what I wanted to say about it today. So, here is my prose poem, a poem that incorporates material from a blog essay I wrote a decade ago about a song that still stands for me as a pivotal and consequential piece of music by what is still, far and away, my favorite contemporary rock band.
Starlings
A cherished memory, maybe one of the most vivid memories I have of fathering a toddler, as most of everything else fades about that era, some sixteen years ago now. Let’s tell it in present tense: it is the first moment I know my son would be a musician, or at least, a boy who loves music. We are driving, I can’t tell you where we are going, in my imagination, it’s spring, but I know it’s 2008 and the boy is three years old, certainly strapped securely into his car seat in the back of the Honda Fit. I put in a CD by my favorite band, Elbow, the opening track, a song called “Starlings.” The song begins with this quiet synthesizer arpeggiation just percolating in the background. It’s so quiet, one’s tendency on first listen might be to turn up the volume. The drums come in, again, quiet, a simple pattern, bass drum on the one, hi-hat keeping quarter-note time, and a tom on two and four. And in creeps, again quietly, these voices melodically chanting, almost gregorian, and then, and then, wait for it, wait for it, this intense and extremely loud, hair-raising horn blast on one. Blam! The first time I heard this I jumped out of my skin. Now, in the car, in response to that blast of horns, my boy busts out laughing, maniacally, uncontrollably. And again, every time it occurs in the tune, he just absolutely loses his shit in the best possible way. It fills me with such joy that I am almost overcome, and in this ecstatic moment, I sing along to the concluding verse, one that begins at a moderate intensity, but with every line is built thicker with layers of instrumentation and ever increasing volume:
Sit with me a while
And let me listen to you talk about
Your dreams and your obsessions
I’ll be quiet and confessional
The violets explode inside me
When I meet your eyes
Then I’m spinning and I’m diving
Like a cloud of starlings
The intensity of the music stops here and there is a kind of pause, a caesura, a moment frozen in time, and I sing along with this single solo line, all by itself surrounded by silence, barely able to voice it through breaking, so full I am with feeling for the boy and for music and for springtime and this song, and with sorrow for the deep impermanence of all of it.
I sing,
Darling, is this love?
And one final rapturous series of horn blasts follow, and my son just laughs and laughs.
michael jarmer 