Cold Words

[See original at toothpastefordinner.com]

From whiskey river:

Report From A Far Place

Making these word things to
step on across the world, I
could call them snowshoes.

They creak, sag, bend, but
hold, over the great deep cold,
and they turn up at the toes.

In war or city or camp
they could save your life;
you can muse them by the fire.

Be careful, though: they
burn, or don’t burn, in their own
strange way, when you say them.

(William Stafford)

Not from whiskey river:

Common Cold

Go hang yourself, you old M.D.!
You shall not sneer at me.
Pick up your hat and stethoscope,
Go wash your mouth with laundry soap;
I contemplate a joy exquisite
I’m not paying you for your visit.
I did not call you to be told
My malady is a common cold.

By pounding brow and swollen lip;
By fever’s hot and scaly grip;
By those two red redundant eyes
That weep like woeful April skies;
By racking snuffle, snort, and sniff;
By handkerchief after handkerchief;
This cold you wave away as naught
Is the damnedest cold man ever caught!

Give ear, you scientific fossil!
Here is the genuine Cold Colossal;
The Cold of which researchers dream,
The Perfect Cold, the Cold Supreme.
This honored system humbly holds
The Super-cold to end all colds;
The Cold Crusading for Democracy;
The Führer of the Streptococcracy.

Bacilli swarm within my portals
Such as were ne’er conceived by mortals,
But bred by scientists wise and hoary
In some Olympic laboratory;
Bacteria as large as mice,
With feet of fire and heads of ice
Who never interrupt for slumber
Their stamping elephantine rumba.

A common cold, gadzooks, forsooth!
Ah, yes. And Lincoln was jostled by Booth;
Don Juan was a budding gallant,
And Shakespeare’s plays show signs of talent;
The Arctic winter is fairly coolish,
And your diagnosis is fairly foolish.
Oh what a derision history holds
For the man who belittled the Cold of Colds!

(Ogden Nash)

…and:

It is little more than dawn when the general comes down Front Street slumped in the front of his coalwagon, the horse named Golgotha hung between the trees and stumbling along in the cold with his doublejointed knees and his feet clopping and the bright worn quoits winking feebly among the clattering spokes. In the whipsocket rides a bent cane. There is a gap in the iron of one tire and above the meaningless grumbling of the wagon it clicks, clicks with a clocklike persistence that tolls progress, purpose, the passage of time. When they stop it is a violent shudder, as if something has given way. The general climbs and climbs down from his seat and goes to the rear and takes up his blackened basket and sets it in the street. He levers up the lantern glass and blows out the tiny flame. He hands down coal lump by lump until the basket is filled and with pain he hefts and carries it to the dim house, through the chill fog bent and muttering, returning lightened but with no better speed or humor to where the horse stands sleeping in the traces.

(Cormac McCarthy, Sutree)

Finally: I first heard about the Seattle band known as Fleet Foxes just about a year ago, courtesy of Jules at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast (yes, the same Jules who JUST, GOT, A, FREAKING, BOOK, CONTRACT). They seemed to me to have come out of nowhere fast, thriving on word-of-mouth rather than marketing. Reviewing a performance in the UK’s Independent in 2008, Simon Price wrote:

What Fleet Foxes have done is to blend West Coast hippie rock (think steel guitars and close harmonies) with Elizabethan madrigals, and — as a side-effect — inadvertently revealed the latter to be a hitherto-undetected ancestor of the former.

The songs, brought to life with ukulele, piano and tambourine as much as with larynx and fretboard, are — in their words — “baroque harmonic pop jams”, expressing 21st-century concerns over 1970s sounds, or in some cases, 1570s sounds. They’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name, hey nonny no.

It’s ridiculously haunting (that between-song chat is necessary just to settle the nerves, lest it all become too much), utterly incongruous, and quite beautiful.

Also in 2008, Spin named lead singer Robin Pecknold its “Voice of the Year”:

Unlike the alien whines of Auto-Tuned pop stars and vocoder-addicted MCs, Pecknold’s vocals feel homemade and imperfect, like a tattered, pilling old sweater — grizzled beyond his 22 years…

It’s hard to listen to Pecknold murmur and wail about shivering dogs and frozen rivers without also thinking about the Pacific Northwest — about Douglas first and percolator coffee and, of course, impenetrable tangles of facial hair.

(That last line refers to Pecknold’s beard, which can seem an apparently impenetrable tangle indeed.)

Jules’s first recommendation to me was their “White Winter Hymnal” — the claymation-style video is well worth  watching (and listening to) — and I guess that could fit into today’s whiskey river-driven theme. But I also like a selection from their first EP, 2006’s Fleet Foxes. (I saw one reference on the Web to how widely that EP was circulated: about 200 copies, all in the Seattle area.) The song is called “Icicle Tusk.” I haven’t (yet) found the track online in MP3 or other form, but here’s a YouTube video which plays it over a static image (maybe the EP’s cover?). Lyrics below the video, as usual.

Lyrics:

Icicle Tusk
(by Fleet Foxes)

I’ll shoot you dead
For the father
Of the coal miner’s daughter
Beneath the icicle tusk
You and me among the flattering dusk

In my haste I draw my weapon
Designing your final lesson
As you recede to the floor
All is silent but the fluttering door

Twenty-five grand on the table
Of the high wall street stable
I’m not responsible for
The reputation of the
Neighborhood whore

But I’m a keyhole peeker
And you’re my surveillance keeper
And though my memory rusts
I will always see the icicle tusk

And I must admit
That it gets lonesome on my shelf
This much I can tell
This much I can tell

I honestly can’t say what these lyrics, y’know, mean. Or rather I should say: what the lyrics mean seems to shift from one line to the next. Is it a narrative? a love song? Is “the coal-miner’s daughter” Loretta Lynn or, for that matter, Sissy Spacek? No idea. But I love the way that the song seems more meaningful if you don’t listen too hard, if you relax a little — and let the sound sort of wash over you.