[Verse 1]
A E
I don't want to live with this feeling any longer than I have to
D A
But also I don't want you to be gone
Bm
So I talk about you all the time
A
Including the last day you were alive
Bm
And I hang your pictures around my house
A
For me to surprise myself with and cry
[Verse 2]
F#5 A5 F#5
Everybody that used to know us seems concerned
A5
But if they knew that when you enter my mind
B5 A5
I'm full of the love that illuminated our house for all those years
B5
And made this dancing child who tears through the days
A5
With a brilliance you would have deepened and sang along with
F#5 A5
But you're sleeping out in the yard now
B5
What am I saying?
A5
No one is sleeping
[Verse 3]
B5
You don't even have a dead body anymore
It was taken away
A5
I went and wrote a check
B5
And got a cardboard box full of your ashes
And a little plastic bag with your necklace
A5
And I drove back home truly alone
[Verse 4]
A E
I guess I didn't bury you deep enough
D A
When I poured out your ashes beneath the three witch hazels
Bm A
That you planted in the yard a few years ago in a triangle for us
Bm
Where me and the kid were rolling in the grass the other day
A
And I saw actual chunks of your bones
[Verse 5]
F#5 A5
Bleached and weathered, unerasable
F#5
You're still out there in the spring upheaving
A5
Coming out of the ground into air
B5
Is that exact fragment your finger
A5
That once caressed me not that long ago?
I still can feel it
B5
And is that other shard a piece of your skull
A5 F#5
That once contained the wild brain that used to overflow with loving?
A5
Undiscovered and gone
F#5 F#5 G#5 A5 B5
And now just shrapnel remains:
A
Earth
F#5 A5 F#5 A5 F#5 A5
[Verse 6]
F#5
Another place I poured your ashes out
A5
Was on a chair on top of a mountain pointed at the sunset
F#5
I went back there last week after a year has passed
A5
And noticed the chunks of your bones that haven't been blown away
F#5
Are indistinguishable from the other pieces of animal bones
A5
Brought there by coyotes, vultures, and gods
F#5 A5
Against my will I felt a little bit of solace creeping in
But I laid there on the moss
F#5
Compost and memory:
A5
There's nothing else
F#5 A5
[Bridge]
F#5
I can hear Wolves in the Throne Room singing:
A5
"I will lay down my bones among the rocks and roots"
F#5 A5
[Verse 7]
F#5
At night I sit and picture myself curled up beneath
A5
Ten feet of water at the bottom of the lake
F#5
I imagined trout bumping against me in the low diminished light
A5
Holding my breath trying to be a boulder
F#5 A5
Eroding, to join you in re-mingling with a background
F#5
Of churned muck coalescing in the dark
A5
But to get ground back down to matter only
F#5 A5
Eternal and dumb becoming not a thing
F#5 F#5 G#5 A5 B5
Abdicating...
A
Form
