for Spencer (and maybe Charlie)
This drummer I watch shy through the electric veil, he plays like a man waiting for a bus. Trust me, the compliment’s coming. Yes, he knows where and when to be, just like anyone with a CTA schedule, like anyone who tucks into the same corner on every kind of morning. He’s always here: for the mornings of unfathomable eggshell light, mornings when the hungover moon crashes heavy upon its best friend’s couch, mornings the sky shakes out its rain like a priest repeating the baptism till it takes. So if he hears in hydraulic overtones, keeps time with tires trembling the asphalt, even from six or eight blocks away—well, maybe he ought to.
But this drummer I watch with my shoulders softening into prayers, he plays like he cares little when the bus comes, if at all. Should the driver pull in tight to a cool curb an hour late, he wouldn’t mutter finally or breathe out a good goddamn. It’s more than worth his time to watch a woman, her blazer framing a Blur t-shirt, fold into the waiting, and to memorize the poems she writes with a simple crinkle of her simple, perfect nose. There is no shame in spending your one witness on the older man who settles upon the metal bench, peels an orange as if he himself were the grower. Any thoughts of arrival, of departure, dissipate with the rain, slow and sloughing down the aluminum roof and tempered glass.
This drummer, he cares little for proverbs about playing the rests, but receives this day’s all. He joins with the snare and the tom, his forearms slick with rain, the electricity of his fellow passengers hidden just behind his heart. The best music comes to those with nowhere else to be.
–
Aarik Danielsen is the arts and culture editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri. He writes a regular column, The (Dis)content, for Fathom Magazine, and he has been published at Image Journal, Plough, Split Lip, HAD, Rain Taxi, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and more.