Incomprehensible

Incomprehensible

Incomprehensible

Incomprehensible, let me be

Highway 17, cotton candy rain

Driving with my lover, we missed our plane

So we added on the hours to see the lupine flowers

Way up past the border, we blew through Thunder Bay

The pine trees are narrow, a billion broken arrows

The ravens and the crows, robins and the sparrows

All across Ontario, static on the stereo

Went swimming in the lake, Old Woman Bay

Traveling with some stuff, I left when I was a kid

Mr. Bear and the wooden box I hid

Full of broken gadgets that mean nothing now

The only thing I'll keep are the letters and the photographs

In two days, it's my birthday, and I'll be thirty-three

That doesn't really matter next to eternity

But I like a double number, and I like an odd one, too

And everything I see from now on will be something new

I'm afraid of getting older, that's what I've learned to say

Society has given me the words to think that way

The message spirals, don't get saggy, don't get gray

But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulder

My mother and my grandma, my great-grandmother, too

Wrinkle like the river, sweeten like the dew

And as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue

How can beauty that is living be anything but true?

So let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair

Let me dance in front of people without a care

Let me be naked alone, with nobody there

With mismatched socks and shoes and stuff stuffed in my underwear

Incomprehensible, let me be

Incomprehensible, let me be

Incomprehensible, let me be