Day 5--Fairy Tale

You are singing Stardust
 like you’re Ella Fitzgerald,

and I am singing Stardust
 dead on as Willie Nelson.

Together we have filled
 our bedroom with enough

dust to set off your asthma,
 though I think you’re scatting

when you cough in that syncopated
 way that sounds like the earliest

records of the tune, before anyone 
 had written a single lyric.

And when I twine Willie’s smooth
 near whine around you,

my eyes closed, imagined bandana
 tight around my forehead,

you nearly die from the reverie,
 the memory of the time

you nearly died running home
 from school, the Wahlberg boy

chasing you. And here is Hoagy Carmichael
  trying to strangle you now
 
with a few changes and a pulverized star. 
 I finish in time to pry

his hands from your neck.
 We catch your breath 

together and close our mouths
 to the lovely and deadly dust

so plentiful in the near-light of dusk, 
  not purple, but dark blue and so plain.