Sign - Joe Henry

I was born in Montreal

A winter’s slip that bloomed in fall

Due my father’s lot in life

I got his name and I killed his wife

As if her blood I’d broken through

Had never been enough for two…

So I was sent out early on

To cutting black ice on the pond

To lying flat and pulling free

Whatever might rise up to me

I held my tongue for seven years

Fluttered my hands, closed my ears—

As if deaf to every word

Refusing every song I heard

That might connect me to this ground

And hold me should I speak its sound;

So silence spoke for me instead

And hovered like the passing dead

Whose prayer is but a laugh unfurled

Above this lost edge of the world

When I was twelve my father fled

He left me all he was and had—

His hammer and a dying fire

An empty vein, and one desire:

To lead my pony from the mines

And ride him hard beyond the time

Of broken, long-forgotten souls

Who become their fathers in these holes

That spark and fume and smoke and seethe

And claim these hills but can’t claim me

I was wild at twenty-three

My burning mind turned to the sea

And a sour engine room

Of a war ship, hoping war came soon—

I spent my rage in tiny towns

Wherever we might run aground;

And every face that met my eye

Was calling on some wish to die

But if I stood and drank alone

Then that wish became my own

The years ran as if for their lives

I, the shameless beau of a governor’s wife—

Standing just outside of view

Holding hats and coats and shoes…

Then running guns for a lost decade

Posing as a doctor’s aide—

I pushed pins in maps to show

How to stop a plague or make it go;

And then they took me out in chains

When a secret shared had changed the game

But, all those days have fled somehow

And nothing occupies me now—

Except for this strange thought of you

Who sat before me back in school

And trailed a rope of braided hair

Across the back rail of your chair

And learned to sign your name in air

And read from lips -oh, I might’ve dared

To simply move my own so you

Could read please love me, and might have too