Joanna Newsom

The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004)

• We sailed away on a winter's day
  With fate as malleable as clay
  But ships are fallible, I say
  And the nautical, as all things, fades.
  • Bridges & Balloons

• And a thimble's worth of milky moon
  Can touch hearts larger than a thimble.
  • Bridges & Balloons

• And all that we built, and all that we breathed
  And all that we spilled or pulled up like weeds
  Is piled up in back and it burns irrevocably
  And we spoke up in turns 'til the silence crept over me.
  • Sadie

• Go to sleep, you stunning sky, gently creep, cunning by
  A quiet hum is amplified by your thumb that you suck dry
  A hundred raging waters snare the lonely sigh
  Hold your breath and clasp at Cassiopiea.
  • Cassiopiea

• I killed my dinner
  with karate
  kicked him in the face,taste the body, shallow work is the work that I do.
  • The Book of Right-On

Ys (2006)

• Emily, I saw you last night by the river
  I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water
  Frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever
  In a mud cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror.
  • Emily

• Then the slow lip of fire moves across the prairie with precision
  While, somewhere, with your pliers and glue, you make your first incision
  And, in a moment of almost-unbearable vision, doubled over with the hunger of lions
  'Hold me close', cooed the dove, who was stuffed now with sawdust and diamonds.
  • Sawdust & Diamonds