Joanna Newsom Quotes

Recall the word you gave:
to count your way across the depths of this arid world,
where you would yoke the waves,
and lay a bed of shining pearls! I dream it every night:
the ringing of the pail,
the motes of sand dislodged,
the shucking, quick and bright;
the twinned and cast-off shells reveal a single heart of white.

But inasmuch as that light is loaned, insofar as we’ve borrowed bones, must every debt now be repaid in star-spotted, sickle-winged night raids

Go to sleep, you stunning sky, gently creep, cunning by
A quiet hum is amplified by your thumb that you suck dry
A hundred raging waters snare the lonely sigh
Hold your breath and clasp at Cassiopeia.

My voice in combination with the harp - which, by the way, I use because I've played it my entire life, not to make some statement about the harp - somehow has … coloured people's interpretations of the music and projected an idea of childlike or fairytale quality or innocence. Which sometimes prevents people from listening to the songs the way I would like them to be listened to.

In this life, who did you love,
beneath the drifting ashes,
beneath the sheeting banks of air
that barrenly bore our rations?

Above them,
parades mark the passing of days
through parks where pale colonnades arch
in marble and steel,
where all of the Twenty Thousand attending your foot fall
(and the Cause that they died for)
are lost in the idling birdcalls,
and the records they left are cryptic at best,
lost in obsolescence

As the day is long,
so the well runs dry,
and we came to see Time is taller
than Space is wide.
And we bade goodbye
to the Great Divide:
found unlimited simulacreage to colonize!

Love is not a symptom of time.
Time is just a symptom of love

Wolf-spider, crouch in your funnel nest.
If I knew you, once,
now I know you less.
In the sinking sand,
where we've come to rest,
have I had a hand in your loneliness?

Picking through your pocket lining, well what is this?
Scrap of sassafras, eh Sisyphus?

And, for the sake of that pit of snakes,
for whom did you allay your shyness,
and spend all your mercy, and madness, and grace,
in a day, beneath the bending cypress?

In December of that year,
the word came down that she was here.
The days grew shorter.
I was sure, if she came 'round,
I’d hold my ground. I'd endure.
But they'd alluded to a change
that came to pass,
and Spring, deranged,
weeping grass and sleepless,
broke herself upon my windowglass.
And I could barely breathe, for seeing
all the splintered light that leaked her fissures,
fleeing, launched in flight:
unstaunched daylight, brightly bleeding,
bleached the night with dawn, deleting,
in that high sun,
after our good run,
when the spirit bends
beneath knowing it must end.

Then the slow lip of fire moves across the prairie with precision
While, somewhere, with your pliers and glue, you make your first incision
And, in a moment of almost-unbearable vision, doubled over with the hunger of lions
'Hold me close', cooed the dove, who was stuffed now with sawdust and diamonds.

I may have changed, it's hard to gauge
Time won't account for how I've aged
Would that I could tie your lying tongue
Who says that leaving keeps you young.

We sailed away on a winter's day
With fate as malleable as clay
But ships are fallible, I say
And the nautical, as all things, fades.