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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Mirrors In My Room, Old-Time Favorites, Mostly Ghosts, Valley of the Heart, Lily Died For Love, The Fix, Where I Start, Song of Love, and 6 more.
1. |
Introduction/Affirmation
00:49
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Affirmation
I can watch roses bloom
With no envy toward the sun
And see the weeds with no bitterness
In the garden I begun
I can send gifts to the wedded
Though the bells ring cold
And with grace let go
Of what desire would hold
I can belong to this world
Without being a possession
And know my destination
Without having a direction
I can sing with rage
As placid as the morning
And find true stillness
In funnel clouds forming
I can safely not know
The answer to the question
But let the asking
Beget the suggestion
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2. |
Walden's Theme
03:47
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Monday
I
When the house starts to vibrate
In anticipation of the night
And the zucchini, breaded and ready
On the baking sheet, neatly arranged,
Waits for its plunge into the Red Sea
I see Charlton Heston as Moses
Spilling marinara sauce on his red robe
Hoping no one will notice
Amidst all the miracles
II
After leaving that house
Towards my bed of down and sleeping dog,
I found I was left with a sweet scent
Somewhere on the right side of my face
Hiding below or just along my jaw line
In secret moments I turned my head
On the unsuspecting scent to catch it,
And each moment was a gift
From a friend I held
Or a leg I rested my head on
Or a parting embrace to celebrate
The practice of gathering
It was a sweet soft spice like a nameless
Orange flower with its dark eye staring at the sun,
It was my father's desk drawer
When I asked him for a glue stick when I was five
He kept a salve like tiger balm inside
Which scented the pencils of my childhood,
With which I drew my first picture
Of a dog that would later be asleep on my bed,
With which I practiced my backwards letters
That would later become this poem
//
The Library
While I was in the library
Finding words that rhyme with ivory
(I've fallen for piano keys)
My friends were outside picking blackberries
While they were weeding the beds of garlic
I was reading a book about farmers
Who couldn't find work
I hope you're hungry my dear,
For I have words to share,
Some truth to confess:
I dress my best
Seven days a week
And I study the way
Roscoe Holcomb speaks
And the way Texas Gladden
Ends her notes by adding
Sudden mountain peaks
The ballads and storms endured
And forms that changed -
I hold the remains as though
America's past was cremated
But the ashes in the urn
Can't alleviate the fact
That we've been burned
While I was in the library
Searching for a word
The ivory keys became plastic
The flag was at half-mast
For the passing of the wilderness
And my friends were locked up
For stopping construction equipment
While I was in the library
The world spun around me
And I finally found my word,
Dressed like me, singing songs
For the last bird of its kind,
For the migrant workers hiding,
For my friends pulling silver fruit
Off starry vines,
Saying,
“Here, take this star,
Take it to the library
And we'll read beneath its light
A hundred years from now”
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3. |
Water On All Sides
02:40
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Storms Returning
or Season of Song
I
I can't be in some stained glass mansion
Getting sideways glances
From the omniscient cowhand
I can't be sailing
Through the dim tunnels of the heart
Finding pain behind picture frames
I can't be bathing
In hardening sorrow carving letters
Onto the trees of my time
I can only dissolve
And hide in the creases around my eyes
Where you'll find me
To say that when I smile
It reminds you.
Then the creases unfold
And I hit the ground
To grow like a seed
In spring
II
No one seems to be stopping,
So why should I?
We're all chasing our muses,
Aren't we?
I've turned a baseball diamond
Into a garden,
Haven't I?
The dirt under your nails
Are my stone fingertips
And the flowers you grow
Are my melodies scented
With sweet blue certainty
The sisters are digging the cistern
To collect the rain,
The family of strange birds
Heard something to make them sing,
And I've been carving my woods
Out of soft wood
Trying with tired eyes
Admittedly blithe in my
Harrowed humility
To find just what it means
To embrace the seemingly
Endless ocean,
While on the shore someone sits
Sewing nets with bone needles
Gutting fish and grinding stone wheels.
You, wishing all the while
For the sweetest deal in which you sail
Over mountains, through deserts,
Taking your time
III
While the summer's numbered days
Shade out the flowers of my uncertainty,
The heat stands still,
The dogs pant in the dry dirt,
And the rattling questions of the cicadas
Are posed in swelling choruses
I respond one by one
As though each wing were
Teaching its last lesson,
Masters of their sound
Found deep in the season
Of their song
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4. |
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Tradition
I
Your crystalline consciousness won't save us
Even the copper in the penny arcade
Of your spirituality was mined
In corners of the Earth utterly forgotten
Repay the priestess of a thousand years ago
By drinking the stolen water of her children
You breathe into that sadness
For a few moments within a week
In a class that fits somewhere
In the fissure between fitness and fabrication
Chanting like crows in rows of colorful clothes
Sewed by factory hands forced off their land
To submit to the law of supply and demand
Your Dharma of detachment is a notion
That floats like plastic in the middle of the ocean
Your mindfulness practice is a helpful distraction
From the sounds of fracking in your neighbor's backyard
Watch with forgiveness as businesses
Burn holes into the lungs of the child
That resides within a fifty mile radius of the coal mine
Go ahead and empathize with the poor lost soul of
The CEO so he might know how to love
Because you gave him a sprinkle of magic dust
From your pouch of boundless compassion
You're up against a tank
Waiting for your magic carpet to take flight
While the sun is setting
On the age we thought would never end
And when the bees have stopped buzzing
And the peepers are deafening in their silence
We'll all hear you say,
“Namaste”
II
To me, the old song is fruit
On the end of a limb
Of an old tree.
It is picked, and the fruit grows back.
I feel the weight
Of the swelling seed
As the branch bends gently
And I wonder with excitement
In the thought of its taste.
You seem the tree is same
But the rain changes
From year to year,
Century to century,
Such that the sweetness now
Was bitterness then,
But the taste stays familiar
And akin to the one some ancestor
Once tasted on their tongue
As a gift from the
Hard labor season.
To wait until the fruit is ripe,
To feel each footstep towards the bough
And extend my hand to receive the gift,
The fruit of purpose and practice.
But perhaps I hold this notion too dear.
Some just that I'm the old man
Yelling at the kids to get off his lawn,
But the kids are breaking branches
Just the other day a young man
With a steel string guitar
Slung over his back
Pulled a pale green fruit
Until the branch snapped.
He showed off the stick
For a month or two
But the fruit never grew
And the taste like sweet rain
And the reward of patience
He never knew.
Here is what I will say:
One needn't be an arborist
To study the beauty of a tree,
But if they're to hold dear
The health of the old growth
As they reach,
Perhaps a student
Is what they should be.
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5. |
Wildwood Flower
03:15
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November
A billionaire was elected president
Leonard Cohen died this morning
And Tom Waits is playing on the radio
Four sheep were slaughtered yesterday
The dog smelled the blood on my clothes
And lately every time I hold a friend
It feels like we're at a funeral
Maybe we are
It could be for Leonard Cohen
Or for the country
Of for the sheep
Kicking their way to the stars
As they opened like
Erupting volcanoes
//
Travel Plans To The Bottom
Of Kakariko Well
I have travel plans
To the bottom of Kakariko well
Sometime this winter,
And I plan on staying there a while,
Listening to those spooky drums
//
Tea House
I always know
When Jess is running the Tea House
I can tell from the temple bells ringing
The throat singing
Inviting us into the room
The candles lit beneath
Carved wooden sculptures
Good people made immortal
Forever holding up their hands
In some holy gesture of understanding
When Jess brews tea
Her hand rests on the vessel
As through the leaves
Whisper into her palm,
“We're ready now”
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6. |
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Untitled
When your heart's ropes are taut
And the words are caught in your throat
As though the thought is stuck
Stubbornly like a rock in dry dirt
And to lift your hand
To stop the falling of an auction hammer
Is a gesture like wind
Blowing a bolt of lightning
When the well-tended roads of emotion
Like Roman waterways crumble
Into the rivers of your arms
And the careful current carried
Through the deltas of your legs
Up to the monument of your mind
Comes pouring over the sides
Of the marble slides
Down into the quiet village
Of your heart,
You might start to feel that
The ropes are taut from falling walls
Being raised up by the enduring community
Of your endless breath
//
Too Young To Remember
Oh, I'm too young to remember
I hear it said often
As though the right to the past
Requires a 401K or a slick new coffin
I don't know that John Denver song
But I know some scarred lines
Of mining songs once sung
On the sides of those
West Virginia country roads
(They spoke in code
so they wouldn't get shot
by coal company thugs)
You'd think they swept your generation
Under the rug by the way you talk
As though the cultural mausoleum
Containing your peace-sign pins
For all these years has been
Bolted and locked
Am I too young to remember?
No, I'm just not old enough to forget,
The way you did when you let
Change slip through your fingers
After you smoked your last marijuana cigarette
Only to place stock market bets
In paisley wearing a necktie
Staring at your secretary's body
Like she doesn't notice
And you hold this
Asking if I know this or that song
By someone who stole it
From an artist who wrote it
But wasn't allowed to vote
Oh, but I'm too young to remember,
It was before my time
//
Wanting Poetry
I miss making love with words;
I want to make these pages scream
And ask for more,
I want to be turned on
By my handwriting
And daydream in poems
That pant in my ear
With words that moan
As they read themselves
Half asleep in the middle of the night;
I want to write so long
That exhaustion means nothing
Until I cover the page with ink
And awake with my pen in hand
//
Wedding
Honeymoons in hurricanes
White balloons in lightning storms
The marquee made of metallic bones
Praying in silent static chants
Clouds spinning in tumbling grace
Offering a whipping gray finger
To touch the earth
In the oldest marriage
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7. |
Hathaway
02:01
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Searching For The Miller's Sonnet
The other day I heard someone say,
“Did you hear that the baker
Has written a play?
Did you know the bartender
Can recite your favorite sonnet?”
But I wondered,
When will the bricklayers
Tell us the story of how
These walls came to be?
Not with eloquence
Or framed in filigree
But with tools and plans
And callous hands
Prying open paint cans
Like prisoners putting on a play
To make sense of the audience
When will the drivers
Whistle to the world the tune
That rides shotgun in their minds
When they cross state lines?
Where is the dance called,
“We don't want your bread”
Choreographed by the convict's wife
And dedicated to the state?
Where is the new rendition
Of an old song sweeping
The nation of electricians?
I don't know
Where to look these days
Who gets praise
And who gets raised
To say their peace
In ways without words?
If luck puts the pen
In the hand of the poet
And the shovel
On the shoulder of the miner,
Call it then the human spirit
That puts a song on all our lips
As tongue in cheek
We dance and fight
On the lawn of that
Terribly
White
House
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8. |
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Eric George Burlington, Vermont
Eric George is a Vermont-based songwriter, sound engineer, and performer of original music and poetry. One of the most prolific folk musicians of the Northeast music scene, he is intent upon maintaining the integrity of American folk music while taking a contemporary approach to songwriting. ... more
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