If Song

If I had a song, it would wake me in the dim before dawn with its buried drumbeat of dogs breathing beside the bed. That song would tune up past the window in a reedy piping of some bird I never noticed, setting up reverberations of dream. A song would march me out the door, where sun finds its notch between pines, so I’d hold my palms up open, soundless in applause. If I had a song, it would keep me going through the day, a tune I can’t get out of my head, puzzling out a word that seeks its rhyme. A song would feed me, tease me, blow me kisses and taunt me with its triteness/rightness till I became the song.