Excuse Me While I Go Fall in Love by MARY KNOBLOCK is a song that lyrically takes one on a journey through dreamy romance and poetic melancholy. It colours an ethereal love story mostly existing between reality and fantasy as it unravels between two lovers connected through a “portal of stars”-a term so mysterious yet so intimate. The magical portal is an image which regularly recurs in this song and invites her listeners into a love affair which is transcendent, out of time and space.

Knoblock starts with the line “Dreamers in the stars,” which immediately sets the sense of wonder and introduces these lovers as beings who exist in a realm beyond ordinary life. By placing them as “dreamers,” she captures the surreal quality of their connection-as if they are celestial beings torn apart by circumstance, yet still inextricably connected. This first image, “halo winters eve,” is a scene both cold and distant as it is beautiful, setting the tone for a story tinged with passion and lined with wistfulness.

The line “Dancing in your portal of stars / To another universe” strikes poetically and suggests the idea that love can be a transcendental force. In this case, Knoblock hints that maybe love can deliver transportive and changing power to the lovers into another realm beyond the limitations of life. A haven, almost fragile, delicate, and temporary, underscored by the phrase “so much has happened since we last saw each other.” There would be a sense of longing, acknowledgment of time, which might suggest love-powerful as it is-cannot transcend in their fullest sense either time or space.

Throughout the lyrics, Knoblock weaves images of nature amongst the phrases of love by comparing the lovers’ feelings to the various times of year. “Covering the icy dew / Of the snow-covered roses” speaks of a love preserved in an iced, untouchable state, waiting to thaw and bloom. The use of roses-those quintessential symbols of love-being cast in a snowy scene is indicative of both beauty and fragility, capturing a love that is enduring but in need of warmth. This is further emphasized with the line mentioning the roses “that froze in their portal of stars,” again hinting at the otherworldly quality of this romance, bound in a place that is magical yet somewhat removed from everyday reality.

Perhaps the most evocative moment in the song comes when Knoblock writes, “Love visited twice / Hearts broke only once.” In this line, she shows that, of course, their love was bittersweet; for as much as love returned, it also brought with it the potential for heartbreak. In these few words, Knoblock has succeeded in encapsulating the duality of love: a force of poignant beauty and inevitable pain that ascribes a love story that is simultaneously treasured and vulnerable. She furthers this by setting up an image that describes the transformational qualities of autumn, saying, “Fall came and went with the burning brush,” which evokes in the mind the imagination of nature’s beauty and its potential cruelty, a mirror to the emotional journey of love that transforms and tries the lovers.

As the song unfolds, Knoblock brings the listener back to the notion of a “fairyland,” describing a “lovers tale” that’s “lost in the fairylands of fairytales that only came true in your portal of stars.” Here, too, the lyrics echo the themes of the passing nature of beauty and the wistfulness accompanying any passing experience of true love. This is a mystical landscape of chances, yet it is kept just out of reach to stay as a memory that one can never let go of.

It was in these words that Knoblock brings the song to an end with a tender refrain, “Excuse me while I go fall in love with you,” reinforcing her implication in the song that despite everything in one’s way, this longing, this desire to reunite with this person, is all strong. Indeed, that one line serves as the anchor of the song because it carries within it the meaning of weakness, of being open to love even in the presence of inevitable pain. With “Excuse Me While I Go Fall in Love,” Mary Knoblock weaves a fine tale of love, otherworldly in parts and deeply human-a beautiful paean to the enduring magic and fragility of romance.