Remember the Mountain Bed

Remember The Mountain Bed - Billy Bragg/Wilco (照辦樂隊)

Do you still sing of the mountain bed

We made of limbs and leaves:

Do you still sigh there near the sky

Where the holly berry bleeds:

You laughed as I covered you over

With leaves face breast hips and thighs

You smiled when I said the leaves were

Just the color of your eyes

Rosin smells and turpentine smells

From eucalyptus and pine

Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed

Where tangled woodvines twine

Trees held us in on all four sides so thick

We could not see

I could not see any wrong in you

And you saw none in me

Your arm was brown against the ground

Your cheeks part of the sky

As your fingers played with grassy moss

And limber did you lie:

Your stomach moved beneath your shirt

And your knees were in the air

Your feet played games with mountain roots

As you lay thinking there

Below us the trees grew clumps of trees

Raised families of trees and they

As proud as we tossed their heads

In the wind and flung good seeds away:

The sun was hot and the sun

Was bright down in the valley below

Where people starved and hungry

For life so empty come and go

There in the shade and hid from

The sun we freed our minds and learned

Our greatest reason for being here

Our bodies moved and burned

There on our mountain bed of leaves

We learned lifes reason why

The people laugh and love and dream

They fight they hate to die

The smell of your hair I know is still there

If most of our leaves are blown

Our words still ring in the brush

And the trees where singing seeds are sown

Your shape and form is dim

But plain there on our mountain bed

I see my life was brightest where you laughed

And laid your head

I learned the reason why man must work

And how to dream big dreams

To conquer time and space

And fight the rivers and the seas

I stand here filled with my emptiness now

And look at city and land

And I know why farms and cities are built

By hot warm nervous hands

I crossed many states just to stand here now

My face all hot with tears

I crossed city and valley desert and stream

To bring my body here:

My history and future blaze bright in me

And all my joy and pain

Go through my head on our mountain bed

Where I smell your hair again

All this day long I linger here

And on in through the night

My greeds desires my cravings hopes

My dreams inside me fight:

My loneliness healed my emptiness filled

I walk above all pain

Back to the breasts of my woman and child

To scatter my seeds again