Kate Sontag
		The Lyricist's Hairpins I find them one night in an old tweed coat and think of the woman from your songs letting down her hair. Who knows how long they've been there or where you were walking when she handed them to you or why she felt a sudden desire to take them out. Perhaps it was the wind or some version she had of herself arm in arm with you and improvising words for your newest refrain. And who will hear me singing these when I put your coat on and head toward the Hudson? Who will know when I put my hands in the pockets what I've found? And will she care if I throw them in the river or clip back my hair? They remind me of the chignon my mother used to wear. In her first wedding album she looks as if she'd stood for hours combing back strand after painstaking strand though I remember times she'd do it with a few fast sweeps of her hands like the deft abracadabra of her one Debussy passage ascending then descending our piano. And if I set them down among ebony rows of sharps and flats at the back of my mind where an absent woman's lyrics lilt rhythmically in calligraphy between notated staves, a tiered chocolate cake melts by the window long after your guests have been sent home, and each weekend you leave more clothes on my hangers like someone slowly moving in, who will know I'm composing this shiny black list of erotica for you to find, or that I keep imagining her putting them back in pin by pin, then taking them out again, trying to decide which she prefers.