Anecdotes - Joanna Newsom

Sending the first scouts over

Back from the place beyond the dawn:

Horse, bear your broken soldier

Eyes frozen wide at what went on

And Time, in our camp, is moving

As you’d anticipate it to

But what is this sample proving?

Anecdotes cannot say what Time may do

I kid with Rufous Nightjar

When our men are all asleep:

«It ain’t about how rare you are

But how hard you are to see

Take, you and me—»

«When are you from?»

said he

In our blind of winter leaves

As we sighted out their fliers

In the grayscale of the night

Fumbled on the bare ground

To bury round landmines

While the dew lay down and dried

We signal Private Poorwill, when morning starts to loom:

«Pull up from your dive!»

Till we hear the telltale Boom

Too soon—

Hotdogging loon, caught there

Like a shard of mirror in the moon!

Now they’ve stopped giving orders

But I follow anyway

Laying in our state of torpor

Waiting out the day

While the dew burns away

Rushing, tearing, speeding home:

Bound to a wheel that is not my own

Where round every bend I long to see

Temporal infidelity

Then all along the road, the lights stream by

I want to go where the dew won’t dry

I want to go where the light won’t bend—

Far as the eye may reach—nor end

But, inasmuch as that light is loaned

And, insofar as we’ve borrowed bones

Must every debt now be repaid

In star-spotted, sickle-winged night raids

While we sing to the garden, and we sing to the stars

And we sing in the meantime

Wherever you are?

In the folds and the branches

Somewhere, out there

I was only just born into open air

Now hush, little babe

You don’t want to be

Down in the trenches

Remembering with me

Where you will not mark my leaving

And you will not hear my parting song

Nor is there cause for grieving

Nor is there cause for carrying on

—and daughter, when you are able

Come down and join!

The kettle’s on

And your family’s round the table

Will you come down, before the sun is gone?