Finishing The Hat... For The Husband

Finishing the hat

How you have to finish the hat

How you watch the rest of the world

From a window

While you finish the hat

Mapping out a sky

What you feel like, planning a sky

What you feel when voices that come

Through the window

Go

Until they distance & die

Until there's nothing but sky

& how you're always turning back
 too late

From the grass or the stick

Or the dog or the light

How the kind of woman willing to wait

Not the kind that you want to
 find waiting

To return you to the night

Dizzy from the height

Coming from the hat

Studying the hat

Entering the world of the hat

Reaching through the world of the hat

Like a window

Back to this one from that

Studying a face,

Stepping back to look at a face

Leaves a little space in the way
 like a window

But to see

It's the only way to see

& when the woman
 that you wanted goes,

You can say to yourself,
 "Well, I give what I give"

But the woman
 who won't wait for you knows

That, however you live

There's a part of you
 always standing by

Mapping out the sky

Finishing a hat...

Starting on a hat..

Finishing a hat...

Look, I made a hat

Where there never was a hat

Stephen Sondheim

1984