Countertop Coin

[Verse 1]
The late shift waitress at the Boulevard Waffle House
Polishes the chrome with a rag gray as a mouse.
Tuesday, quarter past two, the air thick with steam,
She’s tracing the fault lines in somebody’s dream.
Her name tag is peeling, the letters have bled,
A small braid of sweetgrass is tied with red thread.

[Chorus]
She builds a cathedral from countertop coin,
A silver-edged prayer for the world she will join.
Each quarter a brick, laid down in a line,
A patient and dangerous kind of design.

[Verse 2]
She moves like the tide in the brackish half-light,
Humming a spiritual into the night.
She whispers the count of the crumpled-up ones,
Under the buzz of the merciless suns
That burn in the ceiling, a pitiless white,
But she’s weaving her own kind of morning from night.

[Chorus]
She builds a cathedral from countertop coin,
A silver-edged prayer for the world she will join.
Each quarter a brick, laid down in a line,
A patient and dangerous kind of design.

[Bridge]
I watch from the booth through the sugar-jar glass,
This moment will build, and this moment will pass.
And nobody sees how she straightens her back,
Or the weight of the coins in that porcelain stack.

[Outro]
A dangerous design...
A cathedral of coin...