No Provenance

(album: Have One On Me - 2010)

Allelu, allelu
I have died happy and lived to tell the tale to you
I have slept for forty years and woke to find me gone
I woke safe and warm in your arms
In your arms, your arms, in your arms

Not informed of the natural law
Squatting, lordly, on a stool, in a stall
We spun gold clear out of straw
And, when our bales of bullion were stored
You burned me like a barn
I burned safe and warm in your arms
In your arms, your arms

I'm afraid of the Big Return
There's a certain conversation lost and that loss incurred
With nobody remaining to register who had passed this way in the night
In the middle of the night, negating their grace and their sight
Till only I remember, or mark, how we had our talk

We took our ride so that there was no-one home
And the lights of Rome flickered and died
And, what's more, I believe that you knew it, too
I think you saw their flares and kept me safely unawares
In your arms, your arms, in your arms.

The grass was tall and strung with burrs
I essayed that high sashay to my mind, my way
You hung behind, in yours, anyhow, she did not neigh
I do not know what drew our eyes to hers
That little black mare did not stir
Till I lay down in your arms

Poor old dirty little dog-size horse
Swaying and wheezing as a matter of course
Swaying and wheezing as a matter of pride
That poor old nag, not four palms wide had waited a long time
Coated in salt, buckled like a ship run foul of the fence
And in the middle of the night, she'd sprung up, no provenance
Bearing the whites of her eyes
And you, with your arrangement with fate
Nodded sadly at her lame assault on that steady old gate
Her faultlessly etiolated fishbelly-face
The muzzle of a ghost

And pretty Johnny Appleseed via satellite feed
Tell us, who was it that you then loved the most?
Pretty Johnny Appleseed, leave a trail that leads
Straight back down to the farm
Lay me down, safe and warm in your arms, in your arms