The Dangling Conversation

And you read your Emily Dickinson
And I my Robert Frost
And we note our place with bookmarkers
That measure what we've lost

Like a poem poorly written
We are verses out of rhythm
Couplets out of rhyme
In syncopated time

And the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs
Are the borders of our lives

~ Paul Simon

Simon and Garfunkel recorded this beauty in September 1966, but it was never a hit for them.  And given that the song is now over a half century old, some of you may not know the song at all.  If that is true for you, go on and google it now and give it a listen.  Seriously, go.

Wait.  Did I say a half century old?  Talk about measuring what we've lost . . .

The song is written in three parts.  I struggled with choosing which lyrics to post and considered including the entire song.  I settled on the middle verse, most likely for its reference to poetry, something about which I have always been passionate.  Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost were household names, at least in houses where people knew what poetry was.  I cannot read Robert Frost without recalling that cold and sunny day, January 20, 1961 (less than six years before Dangling Conversation was written!) when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was inaugurated.  Frost had written a new poem for the occasion titled Dedication, but he hadn't had time to memorize the poem.  In trying to read it, he was blinded by the bright sun on the snowy Capitol grounds and could not get past the third line.  The fact that he was 86 at the time might have been a factor, too.  It was Richard Nixon who offered his top hat to shield the papers from the glare, but Frost ended up reciting from memory a different poem, The Gift Outright.

I was not quite eleven at the time, and I was a big fan of the Kennedys.  Memory tells me that we had a "snow day" in northern New Jersey that day, allowing us to watch the Inauguration in our living rooms.  Although I can not verify this part, I recall Frost's papers being taken by the wind.  Whether it is real or not, that image has stayed with me all these years.

But I digress.  And maybe for good reason.  The Dangling Conversation is a painful song.  Simply put, it is about failed communication between lovers.  The beauty and gentleness and civility with which the distance between them is illustrated only serves to make the scene sadder.  They are indeed verses out of rhythm and couplets out of rhyme.  The relationship, like the conversation, is dangling, perhaps hanging by a thread?

The borders of our lives.  Are they borders that protect us?  Or borders that hold us back?  In his well-known poem, Mending Wall, on the competing needs of security and freedom, Frost writes:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence,
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.

Do you see what I did there?  I connected the song with a poet and with an Inauguration and with a wall!  (Three more days . . . ) And therein is the secret to relationships:  connecting.  No dangling.  Just strong connection.  We'll get there, I hope.