Look

Lyrics

Driving beyond the city, beyond cattle grazing, the long evening shadows grazing on light until it is gone, and the city is gone, I catch a glimpse of a house just beyond the road. In its one lit window- like a floating television in the dark- a couple makes love. The man holds the woman from behind by the hips, and she sinks into him, open, as though asking him to become her entirely, but the man looks past her, through the window, his gaze a kind of shadow wandering through dusk into the hills, then beyond them as if she is only a telescope to him, as if, when he is inside her, he can see a different life, one which contains neither of them. I don't believe I have ever seen a man so desperate to leave, to enter a woman entirely so as to simply pass through her and become, perhaps, a thought she once had as a girl, become the morning breeze or her bedroom curtains shifting quietly like an Ivory Gull descending. His eyes scan the horizon-the last of the sun a simple red sliver of light, a dim lamp shining from beneath the crack of a great door-and it is this gaze I carry with me. Not the gaze of my mother or father as they closed my bedroom door as a boy and watched the dark fold over my face- and then, one day, never looked at me this way again- nor the gaze of the woman I loved the many times we parted at airports and train stations until eventually we parted and she did not look back, not that of my grandmother, only bones and a hospital gown, as she said my name and then turned towards the wall forever. Not the abandoned calf before it was taken into the woods and shot, not my childhood dog before we drove her quietly to a quieter death. Eventually, everything that can look, will look upon us for the last time, and our memory, which is a kind of faith, will be unable to carry even itself. Only the gaze of this nameless man will remain, floating in a box of light, the planet watching him stare out into the dark living room of the earth.