Lyrics to a song on the new album...dedicated to a cousin, gone into that gone momentum... ALICE OF THE RIVER Cousin Alice was no more than thirty when I knew her by the river, with her dark eyes and her Latin intention. And in my remembering she is smiling, leaning on her door, gripping the edges of the frame, like she was looking out from a photograph. And how she moved from room to country room. Alice, in her new house, washing spoons with water she stole from heaven. She used to catch the rain in buckets to wash with. Copper scent them where they lived by the river with three sons and six acres. Bernard was a farmer. He had muddy boots and dirty hands. He drove a truck, kept black hogs and cows, planted pigeon peas and corn, waved his cutlass hand, with the edge grinning in the sun. And Sunday afternoons he liked to drive across the fields to Sangre Grande, to flirt with the women. to drink mountain dew with the men, to slap harsh cards down. But there were black bugs in the corn that year, and white lice on the leaves. When cousin Alice arrived in Mt Lambert that August she was miles out of country, battered and torn, and swollen with her fourth child. And my grandfather went out in the dark to open the gates for her. Alice, in the bedroom, was either counting the stars, or the holes they left when they fell. And her children, bound to that riverside shack with the paraffin lamps, and Bernard, ripping their lives apart like a plough. Dark shadows one foreday dawn. Thick black blood in the sheets. And that gospel radio was still singing in the kitchen and whip snakes were whistling in the trees. Light was feeling round these houses, ghost white Ibises were preening in the short grass. And I saw my grandmother take Alice by the hand, took her to the car, and how she held her from falling, and how the scene stayed permanent like a painting. Later that year, when the rains came, Alice returned to the river. But nothing had changed. And then we heard how she had tried, and that her eldest son had thrown those pills away. But cousin Alice, she was determined to die. We saw her in that colonial hospital with the vending machines and the chloroform, we saw her there in the dusk with her poison and her pain. They say madness runs in the family that the women carry the territory. It is they who suffer the love, it is they who bear the strain. They said Alice had lost her mind when it was clear to me that their were black bugs in the corn that year and white lice on the leaves and that the life Alice bore could kill from grief. ...................................... Preview and/or preorder: https://itunes.apple/fr/album/time/id775920243?l=en
Posted on: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 13:30:52 +0000
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