Demolition - Mount Eerie
Composed by：Phil Elverum
Produced by：Phil Elverum
Wind blows
Moving dark silver blue
Clouds showing moon
I wake up in the still deep dark
And in that moment pull thoughts back in through the open window
To the ground of this beginning day
The floor by the bed is wood
From my feet to planks to plywood to posts to cement to bedrock
I touch ground and stand up
In the dark life becomes clear
I'm almost forty-six I have so many hopes behind me is turbulence
I sweep the kitchen every night
I fumble my delicate knowing called back in each idle moment
To the archive of smoldering old wounds
To run through them again
I wake back up
Is there a song on the wind?
Recurring questions nudge me along
People ask and I answer that I'm a musician but that's not it
Mother night
The self-evidence of birdsong
I sing my little songs in a burning time of nature
And woman-denying authoritarian landlords
Of numbed-out spectators glazing over the genocides
Privileged and healthy for the moment while seas rise
This place where I live is beautiful and troubled
They say it's in a nation but I disagree
The sloping hill curves around and the river changes course
With decades of baggage
I moved a little bit away from the town of Anacortes
Where the circling military jets roar their reminder"There's wars
This peace you breathe is flimsy We rule"
I bite the inside of my cheek and sidestep mere despair
At the gnashing human world
And I go downstairs in the dark
A stream finds the low place and glitters
There is no other home but here and now
Here on the paper thin west edge of a colonized continent
Enclosed and named and sold and resold in multi-generational deep ignorance
I used to dream that my roots were strong and deep
Then I dug down just barely and found cathedrals
Here a long guest in someone else's home
I watch the islands over the water and wonder
If maybe someday my daughter's grand-daughter will be old here
Healed and grateful
The flat fertile sea between these islands holds everything like I try to
Only ten thousand years ago there were meadows here
A short two day walk to what's now"mainland" bison bones in the kelp
Here on this thin rind of spanning time
I laugh at myself and this scrap of identity
Scraped from the thinnest soil or recent history
A few flashing decades of a hand-me-down homemade myth
A few more boxes of disintegrating poetry books
From a barely cohesive mouse-eaten lineage
Of white hippie west coast seekers on this edge
Trying to get perspective through the fog of America
I shrug laugh and count myself in
I kick and jump beyond this inheritance this too-shallow view
Back to the land to Land Back
One year late spring
I went to a meditation retreat on a very quiet island nearby
I arrived entangled in all these considerations
Why to make a song? How to open the underworld? Who is thinking this even?
And the weird alienating looming eerie blindspot of colonization
The ignored and informative wound showing the way through
The way the roots that held the tree down left a deep hole
Now full of water reflecting sky
I arrived weighted with all this with my backback on the beach
One eye squinted
Murmuring who do we think we are to be doing this here now?
I wriggled but still I stayed
My precious skepticism got left there in the sand
And I climbed the bluff into the woods and found my campsite
Days passed in quiet demolition
Gradually I softened into the insane meditation schedule and noticed a relief
Like a sloughing off of all the extra winter coats
I slept the few sleep hours in total black
My tent loud with indecipherable night wind through the old forest
I dreamed until a 3am demon with a headlamp
And a wake up bell stomped through and tore the veil
Middle-of-the-night-mind still unformed
I shuffled through the salal in the dark
Toward the glowing womb window
Of the one room cabin meditation hall where I sat back down
The iron of the woodstove cracks
Coals chunking down
First faint blue of day
Breath slow in and out
Am I the ocean or in it?
Single candle flam still
Before the first bird and sun fingers through
One hot iron crack snaps
Soft rain begins
