Sign

歌詞

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