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Colin Hay Earns a Standing Ovation
Ace Boggess

—Mountain Stage, 8/22/21

We sit motionless most of the show,
austere as mannequins, masked
against the Delta variant,
our bodies props placed in seats to resemble a crowd.

”It’s hard to sing & be sad at the same time,”
host Kathy Mattea says,
referring to another artist’s recent death
while describing the inner sense of us.

How do we balance happiness & misery
if fear keeps its thumb on the scale?
When last folk singers leave the stage &
Colin Hay comes on, he speaks with joy

about his life, performs in a way
that infuses us with lightness.
Solo songs, covers recorded during the pandemic,
a Men at Work classic from the 80s,

something new from a record
that we must survive the year to hear—
he has us standing, uncommon
in this theater during calmer times.

We need this as much as air,
though air has never left us giddy
as if laced with laughing gas
we breathe & breathe & breathe.

—
Ace Boggess is the author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021), I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, and The Prisoners. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.

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