Sign
I was born in Montreal,
A winter's slip that bloomed in fall
Due my father's lot in life,
I got his name and I killed his wife
As if her blood I'd broken through
Had never been enough for two...
So I was sent out early on
To cutting black ice on the pond,
To lying flat and pulling free
Whatever might rise up to me
I held my tongue for seven years,
Fluttered my hands, closed my ears—
As if deaf to every word,
Refusing every song I heard
That might connect me to this ground,
And hold me should I speak its sound;
So silence spoke for me instead,
And hovered like the passing dead
Whose prayer is but a laugh unfurled
Above this lost edge of the world
When I was twelve my father fled
He left me all he was and had—
His hammer and a dying fire,
An empty vein, and one desire:
To lead my pony from the mines
And ride him hard beyond the time
Of broken, long-forgotten souls
Who become their fathers in these holes
That spark and fume and smoke and seethe
And claim these hills but can't claim me
I was wild at twenty-three,
My burning mind turned to the sea,
And a sour engine room
Of a war ship, hoping war came soon—
I spent my rage in tiny towns
Wherever we might run aground;
And every face that met my eye
Was calling on some wish to die,
But if I stood and drank alone
Then that wish became my own
The years ran as if for their lives.
I, the shameless beau of a governor's wife—
Standing just outside of view
Holding hats and coats and shoes...
Then running guns for a lost decade,
Posing as a doctor's aide—
I pushed pins in maps to show
How to stop a plague or make it go;
And then they took me out in chains
When a secret shared had changed the game
But, all those days have fled somehow
And nothing occupies me now—
Except for this strange thought of you
Who sat before me back in school,
And trailed a rope of braided hair
Across the back rail of your chair
And learned to sign your name in air,
And read from lips –oh, I might've dared
To simply move my own so you
Could read please love me, and might have too
A winter's slip that bloomed in fall
Due my father's lot in life,
I got his name and I killed his wife
As if her blood I'd broken through
Had never been enough for two...
So I was sent out early on
To cutting black ice on the pond,
To lying flat and pulling free
Whatever might rise up to me
I held my tongue for seven years,
Fluttered my hands, closed my ears—
As if deaf to every word,
Refusing every song I heard
That might connect me to this ground,
And hold me should I speak its sound;
So silence spoke for me instead,
And hovered like the passing dead
Whose prayer is but a laugh unfurled
Above this lost edge of the world
When I was twelve my father fled
He left me all he was and had—
His hammer and a dying fire,
An empty vein, and one desire:
To lead my pony from the mines
And ride him hard beyond the time
Of broken, long-forgotten souls
Who become their fathers in these holes
That spark and fume and smoke and seethe
And claim these hills but can't claim me
I was wild at twenty-three,
My burning mind turned to the sea,
And a sour engine room
Of a war ship, hoping war came soon—
I spent my rage in tiny towns
Wherever we might run aground;
And every face that met my eye
Was calling on some wish to die,
But if I stood and drank alone
Then that wish became my own
The years ran as if for their lives.
I, the shameless beau of a governor's wife—
Standing just outside of view
Holding hats and coats and shoes...
Then running guns for a lost decade,
Posing as a doctor's aide—
I pushed pins in maps to show
How to stop a plague or make it go;
And then they took me out in chains
When a secret shared had changed the game
But, all those days have fled somehow
And nothing occupies me now—
Except for this strange thought of you
Who sat before me back in school,
And trailed a rope of braided hair
Across the back rail of your chair
And learned to sign your name in air,
And read from lips –oh, I might've dared
To simply move my own so you
Could read please love me, and might have too
Credits
Writer(s): Joe Henry
Lyrics powered by www.musixmatch.com
Link
Other Album Tracks
© 2024 All rights reserved. Rockol.com S.r.l. Website image policy
Rockol
- Rockol only uses images and photos made available for promotional purposes (“for press use”) by record companies, artist managements and p.r. agencies.
- Said images are used to exert a right to report and a finality of the criticism, in a degraded mode compliant to copyright laws, and exclusively inclosed in our own informative content.
- Only non-exclusive images addressed to newspaper use and, in general, copyright-free are accepted.
- Live photos are published when licensed by photographers whose copyright is quoted.
- Rockol is available to pay the right holder a fair fee should a published image’s author be unknown at the time of publishing.
Feedback
Please immediately report the presence of images possibly not compliant with the above cases so as to quickly verify an improper use: where confirmed, we would immediately proceed to their removal.