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I Was Unnamed

from Cascadia by Noe Venable

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lyrics

Our hidden love is wilder than we know–
a let out breath of evergreen and spruce,
we cannot hold, we could not ever hold.

Before I was your love, I was that loose
and captivating dark, I was unnamed.
I was the shake of fur on shaggy buttes

and rivers swollen with the sheeting rains.
And I have been the valleys that were drowned,
and I have been the mountain that remains

as brown and certain as a muddy mound
that lived its lifetime in a rocky brook,
before I was your love, we were the ground,

where through the heated centuries we shook
beneath life’s smoky, undulating plume,
watched men like starfish spinning in the soot

where life throws up its colors in a bloom.
And earth will take their ashes back again
each certain that his time has come too soon.

But how we can forget these things, my friend,
beneath the clanging changing of the hour,
where clambering word over word, and hand over hand

in endless search of permanence and power,
in hurry as if the throne were never far away,
we trample over perfect, blazing flowers.

The glinting willows stop me where I stand.
I can remember long forgotten names.
I can remember stretching wide my hands

to summon something sentient and strange.
Our fire beating back the dark, we call,
all human only this side of the change

from something into something else; I fall
into the space between their names.
The age of mountains, the age of waterfalls

must flood our human frames, the age
of oceans drown the sound of clocks
in singing whales. The dreamer turns the page.

There, on the evening shore, we stop to talk
where crabs bend their machinery to pray,
the moonlight carving faces in the rock.

The city’s cloak of noises falls away.
The ocean tumbles, tossing in its bed.
I hear its fiery waves. I taste its spray.

I touch your fiery cheek, I taste the red
of our lives’ rivers, singing as they go
to meet the midnight sea where they were bred:

Colossal tideline, generous and slow.
Our hidden love is wilder than we know

credits

from Cascadia, released July 19, 2018

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Noe Venable San Francisco, California

Ethereal Folk Music for Seekers. In the words of Noe's fans: Elven, dreamlike, and entirely original.

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