The Crack Is All I Can See Now (Hero Worship)

Lyrics

[Verse 1 — full arrangement, warm]
She wore her scarf
the way other people
wear opinions
loosely but on purpose
and when she read Baudelaire aloud
the room became the room
Baudelaire intended

I was twenty-three
and I had been in Paris
for four months
and my French
was still a house
with beautiful furniture
and no foundation
and she made me believe
the furniture was enough

Professor Delacroix
who underlined in the air
with her index finger
when she wanted you to see
the architecture of a sentence
She could make a semicolon
sound like a doorway
and I walked through every one

[Verse 2 — arrangement beginning to thin]
I built myself around her
the way a vine
builds around whatever
is already standing
Her reading list
became my reading list
Her posture
became something I practiced
in the bathroom mirror
at twenty-three
not knowing
that practicing someone's posture
is the first symptom

The halo effect
is a cognitive bias
where one luminous quality
floods your evaluation
of everything else
She was brilliant
so I assumed she was kind
She was generous with me
so I assumed she was generous
I did not test the assumption
I decorated it

[Pre-Chorus]
Bay ngoai used to say
cay cao gio lon
the tall tree catches the big wind
She meant
the higher you place someone
the harder the weather
they will face
and the harder the weather
you will feel
standing in their shade

[Chorus — arrangement noticeably thinner]
I saw her be cruel once
Just once
In April
to a student
who asked a question
that was not wrong
but was not shaped
the way she preferred her questions

She did not raise her voice
She simply looked
the way a window looks
when the light
leaves it
and the room said nothing
and the student said nothing
and I said nothing
and the scarf
was still draped
the same way
but I could see
the draping now
I could see the effort
in what I had mistaken
for ease

[Verse 3 — sparse, losing instruments]
The pedestal does not shatter
That would be dramatic
and drama
has an architecture
you can rebuild from

The pedestal develops a crack
thin as a semicolon
and the crack is all I see now
Every time she underlines the air
I see the air
resisting
Every time she reads Baudelaire
I hear the student
not asking
the next question
because the last one
was received
like weather

[Bridge — cello and piano only, 95 BPM]
I did not stop attending
I did not stop admiring
The admiration
just moved
from the penthouse
to a lower floor
where the view
is less spectacular
and more honest
and the furniture
is the same furniture
but I can see
that it was chosen
not inherited

She is still brilliant
She is not the person
I invented
and the person I invented
was more mine
than hers
and the grief
is not that she failed me
the grief
is that I built something
that was never
her responsibility
to hold

[Final Chorus — cello alone, slow]
The tall tree
catches the big wind
and I was standing
in her shade
expecting the shade
to be permanent
and the wind
to be someone else's problem

I saw her be cruel once
and the once
was a window
not to her failure
but to mine
I had made her
into a building
I could live inside
and buildings
are not people
and people
are not obligated
to be architecture

The scarf is still beautiful
The reading is still precise
The semicolons
still sound like doorways
but I have stopped
walking through
and started
standing at the frame
which is where I should have been
from the beginning
which is where admiration
lives
when it has finally
learned its address