Joanna Newsom - Only Skin lyrics

And there was a booming above you
That night black airplanes flew over the sea
And they were lowing and shifting like
Beached whales shelled snails
As you strained and you squinted to see
The retreat of their hairless
And blind cavalry

You froze in your sand shoal
Prayed for your poor soul
Sky was a bread roll, soaking in a milk-bowl
And when the bread broke
Fell in bricks of wet smoke
My sleeping heart woke
And my waking heart spoke

Then there was a silence you
Took to mean something: Mean, Run, sing
For alive you will evermore be
And the plague of the
Greasy black engines a-skulking
Has gone east
While you’re left to explain them to me
Released
From their hairless and blind cavalry

With your hands in your pockets
Stubbily running to where I’m unfresh
Undressed and yawning

Well, what is this craziness?
This crazy talking?
You caught some small death
When you were sleepwalking

It was a dark dream, darlin it’s over
The firebreather is beneath the clover
Beneath his breathing there is cold clay
Forever:
A toothless hound dog choking on a feather
But, I took my fishing pole
(fearing your fever)
Down to the swimming hole
Where there grows a bitter herb
That blooms but one day a year
By the riverside i’d bring it here:

Apply it gently to the love you’ve lent me

While the river was twisting and braiding
The bait bobbed and the string sobbed
As it cut through the hustling breeze

And I watched how the water
Was kneading so neatly gone treacly
Nearly slowed to a stop in this heat
In a frenzy coiling flush
Along the muscles beneath

Press on me we are restless things
Webs of seaweed are swaddling
You call upon the dusk of the
Musk of a squid: Shot full of ink
Until you sink into your crib

Rowing along, among the reeds
Among the rushes i heard your song
Before my heart had time to hush it!
Smell of a stonefruit being
Cut and being opened
Smell of a low and of a lazy cinder smoking
And when the fire moves away
Fire moves away, son why would you say
I was the last one?

Scrape your knee: it is only skin
Makes the sound of violins

And when I cut your hair
And leave the birds all of the trimmings
I am the happiest woman among all women

And the shallow water stretches as
Far as I can see knee deep, trudging along
The seagull weeps ‘so long’
I’m humming a threshing song

Until the night is over, hold on hold on
Hold your horses back from the fickle dawn

I have got some business out
At the edge of town
Candy weighing both of my pockets down
Till I can hardly stay afloat
From the weight of them
(and knowing how the commonfolk condemn
What it is I do, to you, to keep you warm:
Being a woman being a woman)

But always up the
Mountainside you’re clambering
Groping blindly, hungry for anything
Picking through your pocket linings
Well, what is this?
Scrap of sassafras, eh Sisyphus?

I see the blossoms broke and
Wet after the rain
Little sister, he will be back again
I have washed a thousand
Spiders down the drain
Spiders’ ghosts hang, soaked and dangling
Silently from all the blooming cherry trees
In tiny nooses, safe from everyone
Nothing but a nuisance gone now
Dead and done be a woman be a woman

Though we felt the spray of the waves
We decided to stay
'till the tide rose too far
We weren’t afraid
'cause we know what you are
And you know that we know what you are

Awful atoll
O, incalculable indiscreetness and sorrow!
Bawl bellow:
Sibyl sea-cow, all done up in a bow
Toddle and roll
Teethe an impalpable bit of leather
While yarrow, heather and hollyhock
Awkwardly molt along the shore

Are you mine? My heart? Mine anymore?

Stay with me for awhile
That’s an awfully real gun
And though life will lay you down
As the lightning has lately done

Failing this, failing this
Follow me, my sweetest friend
To see what you anointed
In pointing your gun there
Lay it down! Nice and slow!
There is nowhere to go

Save up up where the light, undiluted, is
Weaving, in a drunk dream
At the sight of my baby, out back:

Back on the patio
Watching the bats bring night in

While, elsewhere estuaries of wax-white
Wend, endlessly, towards seashores unmapped

Last week, our picture window
Produced a half-word heavy and hollow
Hit by a brown bird

We stood and watched her
Gape like a rattlesnake
And pant and labor over every intake

I said a sort of prayer for some rare grace
Then thought I ought to take
Her to a higher place
Said, "dog nor vulture nor cat
Shall toy with you and though you die, bird
You will have a fine view"

Then in my hot hand
She slumped her sick weight
We tramped through the poison oak
Heartbroke and inchoate
The dogs were snapping
So you cuffed their collars
While I climbed the treehouse
Then how I hollered!

Where she’d lain, as still as
A stone, in my palm, for a lifetime or two
Then saw the treetops, cocked her head
And up and flew
(While back in the world that moves, often
According to the hoarding of these clues)
Dogs still run roughly around
Little tufts of finch down

And the cities we passed
Were a flickering wasteland
But his hand, in my hand
Made them hale and harmless

While down in the lowlands
The crops are all coming we have everything

Life is thundering blissful towards death

In a stampede
Of his fumbling green gentleness

You stopped by i was all alive
In my doorway, we shucked and jived
And when you wept, I was gone
See, I got gone when I got wise
But, I can’t with certainty say we survived

Then down and down and down and down
And down and deeper stoke, without sound
The blameless flames you endless sleeper

Through fire below and fire above
And fire within

Sleep through the things that
Couldn’t have been if you hadn’t have been

And when the fire moves away
Fire moves away, son why would you say
I was the last one?

All my bones, they are gone, gone, gone
Take my bones, I don’t need none
Cold, cold cupboard, lord
Nothing to chew on!
Suck all day on a cherry stone
Dig a little hole not three inches round
Spit your pit in a hole in the ground
Weep upon the spot for the starving of me!
Till up grows a fine young cherry tree
When the bough breaks
What’ll you make for me?
A little willow cabin to rest on your knee
What’ll I do with a trinket such as this?
Think of your woman, who’s gone to the west
But, I’m starving and freezing in
My measly old bed!
Then I’ll crawl across the salt flats
To stroke your sweet head
Come across the desert with no shoes on!
I love you truly or I love no-one

Fire moves away fire moves away, son
Why would you say that I was the last one
Last one?

Clear the room! There’s a fire, a fire
A fire get going
And I’m going to be right behind you

And if the love of a woman or two, dear
Could move you to such heights
Then all I can do
Is do, my darling, right by you