Réalisant mon espoir

When a friend posted on Facebook
photos from a David Byrne concert
he and his wife attended in Washington,
I remembered seeing Talking Heads
in an intimate little club on Commonwealth Avenue
in Boston almost half a century before
when I was a poor grad student
studying English literature.

They’d just made a splash with “Psycho Killer”
(qu’est-ce que c’est? Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa….),
the club packed with students
who’d paid the five-dollar cover charge
to sit at tiny round tables nailed to the floor
while the band squished together on the “stage,”
a corner of the room more or less facing the crowd.

This was long before Stop Making Sense,
before Talking Heads exploded MTV,
before my wife and I saw Byrne and his Brazilian band
at the Meyerhoff Concert Hall in Baltimore,
mesmerizing us with Afro-Cuban songs,
mambo, samba, merengue;
then came his collaboration with Brian Eno.

Now my friends report their rapture
at The Anthem in DC. Years later,
after that claustrophobic Comm. Ave. club date,
Byrne is still burning down the house.