Robinson

Lyrics for Robinson

Lying in bed resting his feet on the rafters Cold breeze wraps the left side of his face Fiddle hangs by neck in the furthest corner of the room Doesn't want to be played, so it isn't And on the other side, he sits not need to do anything And nothing needed doing And the world kept spinning This is when the earth suspends you All still The wind is stronger now, curtain rods knock his bed frame 2009, the top billboard song is Poker Face And downstairs someone speaks loudly on the phone of bush parties and friends coming home And mountain looks down at the house built through iteration Moving out in all directions every time a baby was born there Bearing witness to the ways that human life will change its landscape Radical, but quite unpermanent. This is the place where Fabian grew up And after his parents divorced they packed up and moved out Lived in town for a few years before school began when he left for Montreal and became a biochemist And I saw him last summer sitting underneath the gazebo He was watching his kids run around Sitting with his wife and laughing And I'm thinking about what he would have now if he had stayed Would things still have turned out this way? A place you know better now, and still clear in your mind A house too, already lived in by long unpresent children Who you saw pass through it and become the men their father sculpted them to be Youth folded up and packed into its box And now unseen in the dark on late New Year's Eve Sits conjoined twin rooms where heard four kids cautiously touching Passed out and through the window on that black and fruitless night The moon cast itself across a field of buried dandelions shouting something of old springs before long darkness came for them Lying beneath friends and family surrounding violent coerced flame That burned next to a barn that pulsed all light and sound against pitch canvas One moving far faster than the other\ This is how our 2014 was brought in Forest shadows are longest while night and year quietly reverses itself again Just enough to begin where they had once both started And few resolutions are made This is the place where the twins grew up And when it was time to leave home and go south, they packed up and moved out to the house one door down from their own childhood home A building vacant of history, or at least one I'll ever know And one night they ran over their deaf-blind dog in the driveway And we watched her sister mourn deeply for the rest of her few days And years later I would learn to play the 100-year-old piano said to come over a mountain It's your house now, but it remains unknown It's origin only seen from old 8mm tapes from your dad Built on his own with a pocket calculator and ambition And a frying pan, a tractor, and the goodwill of his neighbours. And a few dozen trees In '04 and '03 A few dozen clicks out of the city This place has history, although you couldn't see it Received only by living here and in small parts anecdotally A place where dogs keep present and pass through my life And sleep buried in backyards and on property lines And out back more bodies lie as proof of local history Turned swiftly and completely by what has and will always make this place Like the thunder that shocks dread through spines in summer weather But still captivates completely And I grasp with the thought of one day losing him Reduced to truthful nature, letting his last breathe go into the sky like the rest of him And exist only as a thought, as a feeling, as a reflection Like Harvey and Dennis and Beth and Nicole and all them This is the place where I grew up And although the dream is ending, its roots are growing stuck And I like to say that I'm not a sentimental person but emotions have been known to overcome me completely So saying a goodbye to nothing and everything A goodbye to chewing pens and school busses and fallen tree houses A goodbye to guiltless do nothing days I used to spend my youth repeating And a goodbye to these songs not mattering A goodbye