A Quiet Night in Baxter
Verse · Justin McDermott
I was somewhere around thirty,
working the late shift
at the tavern bottleshop in Baxter.
Out the back for a smoke,
I stood beneath the stars.
A quiet night.
The pub on the other side of the door.
I think I’d been remembering
an old relationship,
how far beyond the time we had
I’d once been able
to picture us.
I had friends. There was laughter.
The women I grew close to
passed through my life,
as I passed through theirs.
Ships in the night.
My one true love
was becoming someone
I might never meet.
Home and community
had seemed to hold us closer
when I was young.
I thought that was how a life
was meant to gather around you.
And the old films, songs and books
had given love such weight.
A song could fill a room
with someone who wasn’t there.
I believed love could reach that far.
Yet more and more, it seemed,
we gave ourselves
to things that were not of love,
then had so little of ourselves
left for one another.
I wondered how anything could deepen
with our eyes already moving
towards what might come next.
Or maybe it was just me.
I don’t know.
I was working late in a small town,
looking at a world
much larger than the part I knew.
Then the door opened.
A friend came out from the pub,
and we got talking.
For some reason,
I wanted to say it aloud.
I tried to weave the thought
into whatever we were saying.
I don’t know if it fit,
or whether he understood
what was behind it.
He’d come outside for a chat.
I’d been standing there
with years running through my head.
Now and then,
all these years later,
I find myself back beneath those stars,
turning the same few words over.
I still mean them.
“Love never dies;
people just move in and out of it.”