Going to Your Funeral in a Vee-Eight Ford

Tonight when I lit the light to a new kind

of sleeplessness, I found myself

in the basement, fingering the box

of forgotten records, listening

to Buddy Moss sing his woman down

onto a black bed of scratches. The needle

threads them together in a track

of crackling ruin. Unfaithfulness, a full-life policy:

He’s going to her funeral in a vee eight Ford.

Upstairs, my daughter has prayed

for my salvation from my abundance

of cells, the kind that mean

we’re growing apart. I think

about my life cut down

on wax, the miserable melody of its chords

and Buddy starts slowly snuffing out the light,

the needle of his voice lost in the record’s runoff groove

where there’s no music, only turning static, the arm

of the record player bumping against the black.