Song by Katie Hale Lyrics

Song

In the beer-stocked basements of clapboard bars,
in the concrete pipe that passes
beneath the freeway, in the dregs
of dirt that settle the base of it
smelling of summers
drifted here to die,

Is where the women in my family wait:
my great grandmother and all her mothers,

whispering their ghostly gossip in words
the living cannot understand.

There are cliques among the dead, too -
and they have their own terms
for colours,
for pale roots of corn, the khaki grit of a bypass,
for the reptilian cross-hatching of skin.
When the world perches
on the brink of rain,
sometimes you can hear them
singing,

these women
sounding their words through the woodwind night,

so for a moment
a tune might come to you
unbidden,
and the wind in the cottonwoods is almost
a familiar face.