Ok, I've been saving this one. I find this woman quite extraordinary. Yes it's a little baroque and over-the-top maybe, but if this isn't poetry as song I don't know what is. Makes me weep every time. (I urge you to watch the video to
hear this. The voice is love/hate maybe. I love it personally)
'Emily' by Joanna Newsom
The meadowlark and the chim-choo-ree and the sparrow
set to the sky in a flying spree, for the sport of the pharaoh.
Little while later, the Pharisees dragged a comb through the meadow.
Do you remember what they called up to you and me, in our window?
There is a rusty light on the pines tonight;
sun pouring wine, lord, or marrow, into the
bones of the birches, and the spires of the churches, jutting out from the shadows;
the yoke, and the axe, and the old smokestacks, and the bale, and the barrow —
and everything sloped, like it was dragged from a rope, in the mouth of the south below.
We’ve seen those mountains kneeling, felten and grey.
We thought our very hearts would up and melt away,
from that snow in the nighttime,
just going and going
and the stirring of wind chimes
in the morning
in the morning
Helps me find my way back in
from the place where I have been —
And, Emily, I saw you last night by the river.
I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water —
frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever,
in a mud-cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky’d been breathing on a mirror.
Anyhow, I sat by your side, by the water.
You taught me the names of the stars overhead, that I wrote down in my ledger —
though all I knew of the rote universe were those Pleiades, loosed in December,
I promised you I’d set them to verse, so I’d always remember
That the meteorite is the source of the light,
And the meteor’s just what we see;
And the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee.
And the meteorite’s just what causes the light,
And the meteor’s how it’s perceived;
And the meteoroid’s a bone thrown from the void, that lies quiet in offering to thee.
*
You came and lay a cold compress upon the mess I’m in;
threw the windows wide, and cried amen amen amen.
The whole world stopped to hear you hollering.
And you looked down, and saw, now, what was happening:
The lines are fading in my kingdom
(though I have never known the way to border them in);
so the muddy mouths of baboons and sows, and the grouse, and the horse, and the hen
grope at the gate of the looming lake that was once a tidy pen.
And the mail is late, and the great estates are not lit from within.
The talk in town’s becoming downright sickening.
In due time we will see the far buttes lit by a flare.
I’ve seen your bravery, and I will follow you there
And row through the nighttime,
so healthy,
gone healthy all of a sudden,
In search of a midwife
who can help me
who can help me,
help me find my way back in.
And there are worries where I’ve been.
And say, say, say, in the lee of the bay
don’t be bothered.
Leave your troubles here,
where the tugboats shear the water from the water
(flanked by furrows, curling back, like a match held up to a newspaper).
Emily, they’ll follow your lead by the letter.
And I make this claim, and I’m not ashamed to say I knew you better.
What they’ve seen is just a beam of your sun that banishes winter.
Let us go! Though we know it’s a hopeless endeavor.
The ties that bind, they are barbed and spined, and hold us close forever.
Though there is nothing would help me come to grips with
a sky that is gaping and yawning,
there is a song I woke with on my lips,
as you sailed your great ship towards the morning.
*
Come on home. The poppies are all grown knee-deep by now.
Blossoms all have fallen, and the pollen ruins the plow.
Peonies nod in the breeze,
and while they wetly bow
with hydrocephalitic listlessness,
ants mop up their brow.
And everything with wings is restless, aimless, drunk and dour;
butterflies and birds collide at hot, ungodly hours.
And my clay-colored motherlessness rangily reclines —
Come on home, now! All my bones are dolorous with vines.
Pa pointed out to me, for the hundredth time tonight,
the way the ladle leads to a dirt-red bullet of light.
Squint skyward and listen —
loving him, we move within his borders:
just asterisms in the stars’ set order.
We could stand for a century,
staring,
with our heads cocked,
in the broad daylight, at this thing:
Joy,
landlocked in bodies that don’t keep —
dumbstruck with the sweetness of being,
till we don’t be.
Told: take this.
And eat this.
Told: the meteorite is the source of the light,
And the meteor’s just what we see;
And the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee.
And the meteorite is just what causes the light,
And the meteor’s how it’s perceived;
And the meteoroid’s a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee.
https://youtu.be/vRnikXRJ6hY
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