A Song For My Uncle

My eyes are a couple of old pal alcoholics, drinking together,
drunk most of the time. There are four of them, even when
not wearing my glasses: right eye, left eye, third eye, and
the eye looking back at me from what's already happened
up the road ahead. A story told backwards to now.

Eerie.

I have never given much thought to making a hit song. That
would be writing to an outcome, a death. For me a song is
a mysterious process, a life, a living.

Sometimes I will say that a song just came as is, that it
arrived dressed in a ragged blue shirt, unshaven, talking in
a voice that isn't one I was born with, that it's come from
a deeper source, instructing something I saw or heard or
dreamed. Still, I figure those blessings are earned. It’s
not by innocence they arrive. The quality of experience
is a contributing factor, how you use what is given to you.

Earned.

When you go about finding the beginning of what becomes
your songwriting legend, you try on clothes, secondhand
and homemade. Eventually you find things to wear which,
if not original creations, at least express something about
your soul, your desire, the suffering road, the ability to
behold what is beautiful beyond fashion. If you wear these
clothes without attachment, one day you can begin the
slow undressing, move closer and closer to naked, until
each new song wants to roll you in its arms.

I remember when hearing John Hartford's Gentle On My Mind
for the first time. I thought, "Wait a minute, this guy is
running lines right out to the horizon!" Thank you for that
song, John. John Hartford is dead now and remains a buried
stream in a land that begins digging an artist's grave the
moment he leaves the crib. After hearing that song, I felt
a kind of freedom to play with language. Being a Moose Jaw
boy, I know about roads and rails that go all the way to the
horizon. To begin writing songs that do that...

Calloused fingers grip the steering wheel this morning
From Cut Knife through Baljennie, and southbound to Delisle
He thinks of her and holds the wheel
and does not feel the burning
That makes it hard to breathe and hurt to smile

I trust in mystery more than happiness. These lines begin a
song at the ending. The camera pans backwards into his life,
toward the burning, yes, and also toward the towns whose
roads go out to the horizon. I was in a truck with my uncle.
When you are a young boy and can barely see over the dash,
you spend more time looking at the dashboard, the radio,
the grill, the sky. And sidelong at your uncle's fingers, his jaw,
how his eyes look, how pained he sounds and how wet inside
when he coughs. He is rolling a cigarette in one hand while
his face turns crimson and his old-as-this-place eyes shine.

All that sky behind his words.

Cut Knife. I love the name of this town. The first time I
went there I expected to see people bleeding in the street.
Baljennie. West from Saskatoon, out around where Joni
Mitchell spent her early childhood. Delisle. It not only sounds
good, but it has that secret English shadow born in the
silent 's' that I learned to love later on when I learned to
love silences. There's a movie they shot in Delisle called
Paperback Hero with Keir Dullea and Elizabeth Ashley.
It's about the blurred line between reality and fantasy, and
it's also got the word mazappa in it. Lightfoot’s If You Could
Read My Mind is the theme song. The main character's name
is Rick Dillon, and people he knows call him Marshall. He's a
wild kid, a hockey-playing smalltown hero who's in love
with the character Elizabeth Ashley plays. There's a nude
scene, in the showers at the hockey arena after all the others
have gone, and let me just say that when she's wet and has
no clothes on and her damp hair sticks to her forehead in
ringlets, she reminds me of eveything delicate and aching
and desirable about a woman, including those mysterious
discoveries that make it hard to breathe and hurt to smile.

There's a lot more road and prairie than there's people
You can shave a thought to sharpness
for a hundred miles or more
You'll fall asleep and disappear if you're not careful
Better men than you have wrecked their lives
out on this stretch before
Burning with a feeling
on their way home from a war

I think that's the repeat verse. Not quite a chorus, but
it gets sung twice. Every time I was going somewhere on
the plains, it seems like it was early morning, summertime,
heat prickling, any clothes too many. Do you know how
a prairie morning smells? The perfumes so subtle you can
grow an erection before you even remember you're male.
It's a competition starting between the cool and damp
of night and the coming furnace of day. That wrestling,
a twisting match that happens when night's femininity is
lifted and evaporates sigh by sigh into the muscled arms
and panting-to-do-something hands of the sun. It's sensual.

Damn if your lower lip doesn't fall and dare your tongue
to slide free. When you're a young kid you don't always
understand the embrace of night and day anymore than
you understand what your mom and dad are doing in the
bedroom that sounds like they're hurting each other. The
ground cools at night and the air condenses and leaves
moisture beading on the grassblades and fenceposts and
behind the tiny ears of the sleeping angel girls who keep a
village hidden in the cornfields. Trust me.

Why is it that passionate kisses are mainly saved for the
dark? Because you don't need your eyes, and in that
sweet blindness men can feel and women can trust them
a little more. I figure my uncle thought about these things
when she wasn't around, when he was out on the road by
himself, or traveling with his nephew when his nephew
folds his body into sleep on the long waves of the road.

Old prairie hands hold up a cup of coffee taken black
Creatures find their moisture long before the sun is high
So long without rain now you can hear the pastures crack
As you lean your back against the day you'll die

Who is this woman my uncle is thinking of as he drives his
pickup truck south from Cut Knife toward Delisle?

It's big inside a man. There's a raw, narcotic knowing that's
sub-subconscious, deeper than the spade of casual thought
ever digs. His feelings are down at the level wells are dug to,
where the moisture is, waters of ancient memory, the wet
ancestral whispers waiting to be drunk.

He talked about the bed below the bed. I had no clue then.

Just as you'll find that the deeper inside a woman's being
and body you travel the more strength you meet with, the
more iron ore you break your hands against, the more you
learn of where the witches went when they were burned,
you'll also find that the opposite appears to be true with a man;
under the blackwood and wildweed of his brow and beneath
the rockhound caves of his physique you'll find subterranean
streams, wet clay that oozes between your fingers and
leaves an orange stain, and little fishes that dart in and
out of your ears like the baby lizard tongues of landwights.

Her name is Alisha.

This is long ago now. My uncle’s wife, Emma, had been receding
under cancer for two years, emaciated, and even though he
loved her and she was still alive he missed her vanished vitality.
His guilt was enormous when he felt lust for Alisha, but it was
the gateway he’d left Emma by in his caring sorrow, and a man
out on the plain roads needs to water his thoughts with feelings
or else his heart dries, dies. I know enough about him to say that
his sensuality kept him alive.

The little towns fall off the map, tar softens in the heat
Too long without touches, he has memorized this drive
From breakfast out of Cut Knife to a Delisle woman's feet
The scent of her is all he needs to keep his heart alive

The family disowned him when he moved in with Alisha just
a month after Emma's death. He was certain enough then to
say to hell with you all and not look back. I wrote him, told
him I didn't judge him poorly. I knew where the water was.
I was also old enough by then to know that you only visit your
mystery after attending the funeral of your innocence.

When I started singing five or six nights a week in bars and
lounges each set got to be like a long stretch of open road, and
I'd look out to the horizon past the drunks at the nearest table,
and think about my uncle. One of the songs that brought him
home for me was Hartford's song, Gentle On My Mind, these
words in the middle verse especially...

I still might run in silence
Tears of joy might stain my face
And the summer sun might burn me till I'm blind
But not to where I cannot see you
Walkin' on the back roads
By the rivers flowin' gentle on my mind

It's how I'd escape and be with the fourth eye, looking
back at now from what's already been and done in the
days ahead. A lot of my songs start there. A lot of my
nights end there. There are so many funerals to attend,
but none as important as the end of innocence, where
the song of experience comes up behind you and places
a hand on your shoulder. It's a generous song, once you
learn how to carry it. I've been learning to sing it, growing
a little stronger all the time.

There's a lot more road and prairie than there's people
You can shave a thought to sharpness
for a hundred miles or more
You'll fall asleep and disappear if you're not careful
Better men than you have wrecked their lives
out on this stretch before
Burning with a feeling
on their way home from a war

DL

© Doug Lang 2005