Both Sides

I am eight in a blue striped chair listening.
There is a song that makes me tear up
A pure high pitched voice sings ice cream castles
clouds and dreams and a refrain I don’t
fully understand but somehow do in my belly.

I am eighteen and I know the woman singing
that song wrote the song when she wasn’t
much older than I am now. I’m just beginning
to look at life. I am falling in love and I get
the dizzy dancing way it feels. 

I am thirty-eight and think I am wise. I’ve battled
tears and fears, and have begun to contend
with my many illusions, and still I really don’t know
much about life at all, though maybe more 
then I did when I was eight. 

I’m fifty-eight and I hear the women with the
high pitched voice sing the same song again.
Her voice has changed, a deep smokey, scratch
a signature vibrato, low and tremulous and reaching
always reaching toward all she does not know. 

I know she knows and doesn’t know life at all
and while the chords are the same, she owns her
wisdom differently than she did as a girl. Her voice shows –
and my old ears hear this other side net gain to 
the bittersweet circus of living every day. 

Strange,
this change.