Wide Awake

I will return here one day
And dig up my bones from the clay
I buried nails and strings and hair
And that old tooth I believe was a bear's

It's late. Other cities disappear. There is only this city.
What is this I am hearing? A kind of intimacy, as though
I am passing after midnight by a neighbour's open window
and someone is whispering a song.

Sonically, it's a closely-miked sound, each scratch of
the fretboard clear, squeak of a callous drawing along
the ribbed-steel guitar strings.

The lyrics above are from Eyepennies, by a band called
Sparklehorse. That song was one of the first I remember
that had this sound I'm talking about. M. Ward's song,
Carolina (from End Of Amnesia), was another. There's
a layering to it, yet you can tell the recording was made
in a home setting. At least I imagined that while listening,
i.e. that this was the work of a lone artist, away from the
watchful eye, working graveyard hours.

I heard it a little in a few cuts on those Ani Difranco efforts
where she put sounds in back of Utah Phillips' raps. Some
of the lost and lonely sounds, like in the instrumental of
Joe Hill, in the memory of Eddie in Holding On, in the Long
Memory. On Malcolm Holcombe's A Hundred Lies record,
his rough-confessional singing is collared by a dobro sound
that moistens the shiplap and calls to mind other nights
when there was a body near, moonlight charming a cheek,
a nipple constricting awake beneath a lover's finger.

I hear all of these things together, part of a wider sequence,
trail of voices across a continent, "all that road going," as Jack
Kerouac would say. The better 'Americana' things all contain
moments of it, going back to Whiskeytown and Uncle Tupelo,
a sort of end-of-the-day weariness when the sidewalks receive
the midnight, cackle of breeze. You almost hear Boo Radley sing.

Lately, it's been there in the records of Sufjan Stevens (Seven
Swans) and Sam Beam's Iron & Wine (Our Endless Numbered
Days, Woman King), and in the records of Joanna Newsom (The
Milk-Eyed Mender), Redbird (Redbird), Bright Eyes (I'm Wide
Awake It's Morning), Jim White (No Such Place, Wrong-Eyed
Jesus), Richard Buckner (Devotion & Doubt, The Hill) and in parts
of a record by Arcade Fire from Montreal (Funeral)...

They say a watched pot won't ever boil
Well, I closed my eyes and nothin' changed
Just some water getting hotter in the flames
It's not a lover I want no more
And it's not heaven I'm pining for
But there's some spirit I used to know
That's been drowned out by the radio...

It's all got a texture to it, borne forth by either an intimacy
or a slightly hallucinogenic quality. The sensation at times
is like falling backwards into a mountain of raked leaves,
trust in that loss of balance, a kind of play we engage in
on our way home from the WTO demonstration or late
movie at the Ridge Theatre, sharing a jar of homemade
cider to cut the lingering taste of the tear gas, or refined
sweetness of Hollywood.

We remain hopeful, despite carefully organized nightmares.
Are we naive rebels? Perhaps you have to be, at least able
to shrug off the horrors, and dance. Resolute subscription
to the reality that is light in us unborn, petting the shadows
down to memory, alive, alive, and hearts are open late.

Sometimes, toward the end of my radio show, which is
near to midnight on the west coast, I imagine listeners
laying back in dark rooms with their eyes closed and I
will start to spin these kinds of nextdoor neighbour songs,
window open, passersby hearing notes from a plucked
guitar, slightly off-centered violin, one voice, then another,
in close-but-no-cigar harmony. Real music, our listening
closer to that of dogs in their heightened ear for keening.

I'm listening to The Arcade Fire as I write this, something
called Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles). The lyrics above are
from this piece. Before this was Une Annee sans la Lumiere,
A Year Without Light, and hasn't it seemed so. Somewhere
behind the singing and raw violin I hear whistles of kettles,
water boiling, and trust that there are seven. I hear a spoon
clinking in a mug so long drunk from it's grown heavy as a
child in my arms.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep,
the signals we give - yes or no, or maybe -
should be clear; the darkness around us is deep.

It's from a William Stafford poem, the great Oregon poet
and conscientious objector, who died last decade.

Someone's making tea.

A car goes by, slows, then accelerates again. There is a little
wind in the bare branches, the last raccoon with tin foil in
his claws. The traffic light at Holdom's corner creaks, needs
a drop of oil in its hinge.

Scent of rosehips, spoon of honey.
Rich as the gods and out of money.

Midnight long past, I'm wide awake, it's morning.

DL