Hello again…
Okay, maybe another quick reply for those inquiring about some revelation into what I was thinking, which may help also to spur some follow up conversation and advice for… well… any of us who may find ourselves in similar situations…
My idea for this originated over 14 years ago, when I drove out to Indianapolis to meet one of my best friends for his birthday. I arrived at the bar a couple hours early, and knowing that he and his work friends wouldn’t be showing up for quite some time, I settled down with a beer and just kind of watched the crowd as I often do. I watched an older couple enter, order a couple drinks and sit at a table. They sat there, smoking (you could still smoke in public places back then) and drinking, but never speaking a word. They were there about an hour, then quietly paid their tab and left.
So I started wondering… do they speak? Were they once young and in love… holding hands, kissing in public, skinny dipping, that sort of thing? If so, how do you get to the point where maybe you don’t communicate any more. So, I pulled out a notebook and a pen and just started scribbling ideas down, like a stream of consciousness. By the time my friend arrived, I had a rough poem sketched out, not too dissimilar to what I have here – same basic premise, trying to show young lovers against aged, seemingly lonely people. Now, for all I know, that particular couple probably left the little neighborhood bar I was in, went to a country and western bar and stayed up ‘til 3 am line dancing!! But I guess I imagined something drearier and much, much grayer.
Over the years, I keep putting it away for awhile, then bringing it up, reading it, not liking it, re-writing and editing. Sometimes I get more “direct” … and the most recent time I pulled it up was last December, and when I read it, I wanted to vomit. I thought, “what the heck was I thinking, this is just AWFUL!” and started into extensive re-writing yet again. But, as a poem. Always as a poem, really. I had it where I felt mostly good about it as a poem and a friend of mine suggested I submit it to a song lyric contest. I didn’t think of it as a lyric… didn’t have a steady meter or nice rhyme scheme… but my friend suggested that it read well (and I was trying to create a poem that could make a good “performance” piece in that regard) and had a little ambiguity to it, which he liked.
So, the “now” chorus-like sections are meant to be “present day”.. in old age… I wanted to suggest time passage on the order of “hours”… they are sitting… then lying watching Leno… then settling down to sleep. The flashbacks to the happy youth were intended to suggest time on two levels… seasons, really, and years, more subtley, much more ambiguously. The first verse is in winter, obviously, and they are participating in more innocent activities… making angels in the snow, throwing snowballs… like they’re very young, just kids and it’s January or February in a Midwestern US town… next we see them rolling in clover and skinny dipping… a little more… hormonal?... like teenagers in the spring?... then finally we see them strolling hand in hand, kissing goodnight, making wishes… perhaps a little more mature, in summer, closer to marrying age… and in that sense, the scenes of them old and in their room… kind of like autumn… gray, late in the year…

I admit… very subtle… perhaps too subtle by half?... and how does that translate to a song lyric? As a poem, maybe if it strikes someone, they can really linger and re-read and “study” to try to find things like that. In various incarnations of this particular poem/lyric, I’ve been more direct, but then the guy seems too whiny, or it just seems too obvious (I still have one remnant from some of those versions… the “could so much time have passed?” in line 2… which still reads “too on the nose” to me in many ways). And attempts to bridge some of the middle portions of their life together to show a general ‘fading’ of love… seemed to me to come up hollow… I tried to focus on the contrast “what was” vs. “what is”… and leave the guy seemingly confused and helpless as to when it happened or how to get it back.
So, again, not necessarily to make this about me, but in similar situations, has anyone any tips, suggestions on how to balance subtlety vs. clarity in a lyric… or to succinctly capture and sum up a lifetime in a relatively short lyric (mine you the Fogelberg song ref was gold – thank you!... and i know several of you have given me some suggestions related to this as well and i'm still taking notes!), how or when to go for “details” vs. “broader emotion” or balance those… all in trying to keep to a song-length…? I have been discovering most of my poems and lyrical poems that I’ve written are in the 400-800 word range… not so conducive in general to a lyric.