A Left-Hand Pour

[Verse 1]
You tap the Sazerac glass on the cypress bar, one-two-three.
A Treme superstition for a man you shouldn't see.
The ritual is muscle-deep, a grain you can’t sand down,
An heirloom map of fault lines running through this part of town.

[Chorus]
This is the left-hand pour, the salt across the sill.
The oldest kind of logic that the daylight cannot kill.
This is the gilded seam, the beautiful defect.
A little prayer for something you don't have the plans for yet.

[Verse 2]
He maps the Mississippi's bend on a napkin, bone-white,
And you calculate the angles of his shadow in the low light.
He asks you, "Are you somewhere else?" a line you've heard before,
As you feel that cold, familiar draft from an ancestral door.

[Chorus]
This is the left-hand pour, the salt across the sill.
The oldest kind of logic that the daylight cannot kill.
This is the gilded seam, the beautiful defect.
A little prayer for something you don't have the plans for yet.

[Instrumental Break]

[Bridge]
You watch the way he holds his glass, a careful, steady brace.
Is that his father’s caution, or just the bourbon’s grace?

[Outro]
It’s ten past one. You lift the glass.
The first crack in the cast.