When you come home / and all the world's asleep /

I'll close my eyes / and breathe with sweet relief"....

- OtR, from "Snowed in with You"

Over the Rhine is coming to Seattle this weekend, and I've been preparing by listening to their albums over and over and over and over again. Even Snow Angels has made an appearance, and I usually can't stand Christmas music before December. But that album, wow, I love it.

And I felt like this poem Linford's got below, before I went away last weekend. Even though I went to a city, I needed to get out of the one I was in...

Exit

I have to leave the city now, she said,
Or dash my soul against my will instead.

I do not wish to have the quiet part of me
That once could rest (the part
That could just be) tossed
Aside and left somewhere
For dead.

Tonight it seems to me
That what some friends call energy
Is nothing more than a phenomenon of nature known as
"Incurable Whirling Disease."

Please, take me far from here, she said,
The buildings sting and echo
With the fumy cries of yellowjacket cars.

I took her hand in mine and said,
I'm thinking of a place now
Where I used to have to tell myself
Aloud,
Those are not clouds,
They're stars.

Copyright 2007, Linford Detweiler