Gillian Welch :: Orphan Girl
from Favorite Moments of Least Favorite Step-Fathers
The way newspaper softens
after crumpling and uncrumpling
while waiting for the newlyweds
to get home from their datenight.
The quiet you insert
after each question
he asks—some late evening drive—
and how the power you feel is even
better than hoping you appear
thoughtful.
Ditchgrass out the window
practices its magic as if it’s got all the time
in the world.
The girl’s hair smells
of lifesavers. She smiles with half
her mouth and asks if you think
people
should be married forever.
Summer. So hot you wonder
if the crickets might
rub themselves
into flames, and their music swells
just as you’ve decided, one last time,
if you like it better when he introduces
you as his stepson, or simply his son.
Orphan Girl (4.5mb mp3)
Gillian Welch (homepage, profile)
Califone :: Quarter Horses (B-Slow)
Come when you come. Slow angels lose.
Some believe it most pure
as it approaches the condition
of music. The poem as some fledgling
wren struggling to take flight, its wings
blurring air, as if trying to shake free
from its own body, the weight
of which stands for meaning, to escape
the hard dirt and its thin wire
of horizon splitting sense from song,
earth from sky. And the bird wants
only sky, the kind of endlessness
in which a cry represents nothing,
or the only thing, and carries for miles.
I’ve always been skeptical. Always
the earnest one who loved the hushed
story of the wings—the panic, the urgency.
It makes a different kind of music,
as rare as the birdsong born of it.
And so what to make of my long love
for Tim Rutilli’s genius? I first heard
it as blues from the bottom of a bottle
of Robitussin. That guitar’s signature
twang and bent sustain. The words
refracted from the salons of Europe’s
early twentieth century. Such distances
from those first Red Red Meat LPs,
those postcards with the rumble
of Camaros, jaundiced grins.
Now music familiar only because
it haunts, and hints of another life,
a songbird assembled from spare feathers,
tape, hollow bones. A terrible likeness.
The eyes like oil stains. The voice lifts
into chorus. The throat strains.
The body somehow warm,
though it weighs almost nothing.
Quarter Horses (B-Slow)
Califone (homepage)
(note — a different version of this song originally appears in 1997 on Red Red Meat’s There’s a Star Above the Manger Tonight).