Joanna Newsom Quotes

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

In the folds and the branches,
somewhere, out there,
I was only just born into open air.
Now hush, little babe.
You don’t want to be
down in the trenches,
remembering with me,
where you will not mark my leaving,
and you will not hear my parting song. Nor is there cause for grieving.
Nor is there cause for carrying on.

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

The tap of hangers,
swaying in the closet —
unburdened hooks
and empty drawers —
and everywhere I tried to love you
is yours again,
and only yours.

It does not suffice
for you to say I am a sweet girl,
or to say you hate to see me sad
because of you.
It does not suffice,
to merely lie beside each other,
as those who love each other do.

Coats of bouclé, jacquard and cashmere;
cartouche and tweed, all silver shot —
and everything that could remind you
of how easy I was not.

It is too short — the day we are born,
we commence with our dying.

Hung from the underbelly of the Earth
While the stars skid away below
Gormless and brakeless; gravel-loose
Falling silent as gavels in the snow.

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

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.

Driven through by her own sword,
summer died last night, alone.

And, when the bulbs do flash,
as bright as morning,
the crowd keeps on gathering
like an electric storm.

With the loneliness
of you mighty men,
with your mighty kiss
that might never, never end,
while, so far away,
in the seat of the West,
burns the fount
of the heat
of that loneliness.

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?