Foxglove Through the Clearcut

There was a man who used to live by the ocean

But he never set foot in the sea

It made him nervous that the water was always in motion

And he feared the creatures who swam beneath

And when I asked him how he’d ended up there

Above a world he would never know

He said he’d driven all the way across America

And when he got to thе edge therе was nowhere left to go

Nowhere left to go

He said that nothing lives long, only the earth and the mountains

As he quoted black kettle’s death song

The words drifting off into the emptiness

Of this great land where we’ve never belonged

And while the frontiers are ever-expanding

Our living rooms fall into disarray

And no one seems interested in fixing what they’ve broken

They just sweep the pieces into the bushes and slip away

And slowly slip away

And now he and I watch the foxglove grow through the clearcut

Where a forest once grew high and wild

For what is a funeral without flowers

And ten thousand tombstones reaching for the sky

Reaching for the sky