1. |
Light In, Moon On
05:39
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Don’t let the light in, Don’t let the moon on
I just want to sit with the darkness for a little bit
The day has fallen down
The show is over in someone’s house,
Someone’s dog is asleep on the couch
We crawl into someone else’s bed
Horizon hangs heavy
We’re always singing these old songs
To someone new it seems before too long
Does it seem for you too?
Did last season’s curses catch up to you
As you climbed up the side of the house
You were hiding out on the rooftop
With only the winds to protect you
Just pissing on your alters
Cursing to an empty sky, Calling your beloved sea
It all goes up in flames time and time again
But you’re still someone’s son
Still the dew on someone’s morning
Despite all the shit you’ve done
We’re two broken bones I guess
Camped out in borrowed bodies just waiting to set
With an old growth heart
Just pumping on the forest floor
Beating on the forest floor
With only the canopy to see you
Dying on the forest floor.
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2. |
Swallow's Call
03:15
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These broken bones are mending I heard the swallows call
That end is this beginning along that ancient ball of twine
It’s stitched into our skin and woven into our knowing
These old roads keep bending as I follow the bizarre
My pocket’s lined with precious metals carved into a burning star
It’s burning up in my palm
They say it won’t take long this time
This go around
This roll on through
Are you still wild too?
With time comes a shifting
Mind’s eye opens and consciousness drifts
Along that fine line of sight
What once was satin is that twine now wrapped tight
Around our wrists
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3. |
A Crude Likeness
03:38
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I accrued a crude likeness of you
Sketched it from the morning light
Drew a side profile scratched in the Prince Edward Island snow
By the time the dawn had broke you were broken in too
Searching for any home that might make a moon of you
Wind twists around the old weather vane again
Like a tendril it takes root now you've lost all direction
You can use the seven stars of the big dipper
To find polaris, lord only knows how much you've missed her
You can see it best from the rooftop after dark
When you're singing childhood songs that fill you with longing
When the nightbird choir strikes, it will call the tide
Like a trick of the light, see your chest fall and rise
Scrape the sinew from the skin of a story
Pull back the ivory of a history grown over
Meet me by the hollow tree, hang your dusty harp
Well you're no Ullyses but you're still after my heart
These are the end of days you know, is your house in order?
Are you the architect or the graveyard digger
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4. |
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Light Around the Body
Light around the body
Is the storm or stillness of the heart
Are you the desert winds blinding
The devils staircase winding
Squandering your darlings
While Orion, with his watchful eye, hangs upside down
Light around the body
Is choking on eucalyptus and rose
Velvet hand milks the deer
Queer lake is on fire
Where the highway meets the highway scum
You swoon at the seal of Solomon
Light around the body
Is the larch turn its yellow face to the sun
A people stare down the barrel of a gun
After the fault lines of the earth had come undone
And the red gums bleed in the valley of the giants
The angels in the mountain ash have turned their backs
As if waking from a dream
The pleasure fades as the morning breaks
Solstice has come and gone again
And again we haven’t learned anything
We’re the sap that flows in the spring like gold
So down sugar mountain we go
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5. |
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Oh so skinny legs and all
Dangle over the edge
Tell me do you fear the fall
Or are you done mama done mama done
Do you glimpse the world to come
Do you like what you see
Do you wait with bated breath
Or are you free baby free baby free finally free
Oh the writing's in the sky
This moon is in her final phase
You're the heart and you're the break
You're the echo and the grace
Oh and when you brush my hair
Oh and when you the braid the strands
I glimpse of the mirrors of your hands
And all the memories stored there mama there mama there
Oh the writing's in the sky
This moon is in her final phase
You're the heart and you're the break
You're the echo and the grace
Oh and just before you go
Sit with me a little awhile
I listen for the silence
And the sound the morning sings mama sings mama sings
Oh the sound the morning sings
Oh the sound the morning sings
We’ll listen for the silence
Sit with me before you go mama go mama go
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6. |
Daniel
04:35
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So it wasn’t your finest hour
Head in a cradle dead drunk on the floor
We’ve all been there before we’ve all been there before
October is over without you noticing
Without you leaving your ocean stained bed
With that ocean stained pillow neath your ocean stained head
From the book of lamentation to the days of awe
I saw Daniel in the den of lions
A shadow cast over his pale face
I caught a glimpse at day break and he was gone
Always you were the leaving kind
Hell bent on dying you walked out with the tide
So when the river called you in, already you’d penned your goodbyes
From the book of lamentation
to the days of awe
I looked into that lion’s eye
And you were all I saw
Now when the sun goes down on an east coast shore
I think of the love you held for the tributaries of the north
What of ourselves do we leave behind
As we ebb with the ebbing times
Now you’re sunlight,
You’re that incandescent bloom
You’re a high-oxygen fire burning blue
Now your Daniel, you’re our lion
You’re the spark and the flame and now you’re flying
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7. |
Greenbelt
06:36
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The green belt never felt so far as today
Half the country and all five great lakes away
Still in my minds eye the bartlett pears are growing wide
At the end of the long drive in their fat bottom glass jars in a scraggly line
It was magic then but I'm hip to your tricks
Now the pickings are slim but I'm still feeling it
magic, magic of the greenbelt
We grew too side by side drunk off the heady vidalia on the winter vine
Time was blind like the breath of morning
On the cusp on a drop of something divine
Feel the stick smell the sweet of the juice of the ripe blackberry on your feet
Bare and red past the wicked woods a golden thread
Still the bee stings came to a head
It was magic then but I'm hip to your tricks
Now the woods are stripped but I'm still feeling it
Magic, magic of the greenbelt
How does a secret get set free?
When three moons rose in the black sky we were ready
The six daughters of the three daughters
dutifully gathered plus one extra for fodder
To lift the curse of the black hen
Placed on the family she couldn't quite remember when
Sat at the table wide eyed and spooked
We worked our juju from every angle
When at last we failed our task now the curse has crept into every last crevice
It was magic then but I'm hip to your tricks
Now your secrets are safe but I'm still feeling it
Magic, magic of the greenbelt
Strain of the old country pain collides
With the drive and ambition of their new country lives
Tales from before and of the war simmer in the soup and are met at the door
In the hushed tones of their mother tongue
Our mothers spun out on some tough love so hard won
What was once yours is now mine
It's a hand me down story embroidered with time
But there's a tear down the middle of the table cloth of this family riddle
It was magic then but I'm hip to your tricks
Now I can’t mend the bend but I’m still feeling it
Magic, magic of the greenbelt
The lines are faded now the light is low
Trace the hughes of the evening blues from the kitchen window
Tall shadows of Yiddish in the morning
Are ghosts come to call like notes in the wailing wall
Still all roads lead to cherry and green lane
When the pecking order was the rule of the day
Back to the lake hidden in plain sight
Is the better to be right or to belong?
It was magic then but I'm hip to your tricks
Now the farmhouse is quiet and all that went with it
Magic, magic of the greenbelt
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8. |
Hoodoo
04:12
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The hoodoos do not take their shape for you
Trace your eye down their rocky spire
Laced with limestone and wind and fire
There goes the bare bones of the Badlands.
The milky way drips down to the emerald lake
Stare to the bottom of sweet Louise
Toss in your sins for a cheap release
Your prayers are there
In pieces where there should have been a lake bed
Lines on her faces is light of the moon
Beat of a thousand wings circle the room
Our bodies breathe with the salt of remembrance
Her lifetime resides in the cells of your skin
Her voice is your voice and a voice from within
Do you sing, do you bring the Mourner's Kaddish
הֵא שְׁמֵהּ רַבָּא מְבָרַךְ לְעָלַם וּלְעָלְמֵי עָלְמַיָּאy
Lines on her faces is light of the moon
Beat of a thousand wings circle the room
And if you’re quiet
You can hear the song
It lives in a fistful of sky just beyond your reach
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9. |
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Be the Breathing barrel with its pomegranate throat
And your mouth wide open the shape of the ocean
Be the very first bubble on the brink of a boil
Be the vine growing pale and the growing pains of the pine
Be July in the wintertime
Against a flattened sky you reach out
Can you touch it
Can you feel it its’ almost divine
Be the written word to the printing press
Be the reading of the palm along with those unexpected blessings
Be the map of the city alight with hiding spots of love
Be the foothills, the lay lines, a window seat to a simpler times
Be July in the wintertime
Against a flattened sky you reach out
Can you touch it
Can you feel it its’ almost divine
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Dana Sipos British Columbia
hypnotic folk from Turtle Island.
The Astral Plane, produced by Sandro Perri, out on Toronto's Roaring Girl Records June 2021
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