Jeff Tweedy Remember The Mountain Bed
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 wood
vines 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
Your fingers played with grassy moss, as limber you did
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 life's
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 breast of my woman and child to scatter my
seeds again