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lyrics

At the end of October of 1992, I rented two rooms in an older woman’s house, a bedroom and a work room for drawing my animation. During the first night in my new place, which was Halloween, I sat uncomfortably on my bed trying to read “Othello.” I couldn’t keep my focus, so I put the book down. I resisted the urge to drive across town to our old apartment and plead for another chance. I didn’t think I was clear enough to draw, but I picked up a pencil and instead wrote a poem about Sayer, quickly and without revision. I had intended to turn it into a song for the “Difficult Loves” album, but for some reason never did. A quotation from Carson McCuller’s comes to mind – “there’s nothing that makes so you aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished” – so I feel compelled to write a song to the words now.

“Her Hands”

Her hands are crooked as roots,
Drawing memory out of deep
Wide-woken wells of sleep
In the soil of her childhood,

Where she nursed her father
Off her mother’s blackened breast
And drank up all the noiseless space
Like rare, dark water.

Her hands are weathered as bark,
Broken, split and worn
Tough by the shock of storm
And the worm-wound darkness,

In which she masturbates
Anxiously, she desires
To force some quiet nails through
The loud skin of sensation.

Her hands are small as leaves,
Folding on the morning
Light in early spring
When they fall on me,

And I know this beauty, wrought
In struggle with itself, above
All else it bears the love
That’s suffered and has fought.

credits

from The Break​-​Up Album: 25 Years Later, released May 29, 2019
Reid Kruger - drums, voice
Tom Schroeder - guitar, voice
Jonathan Zorn - bass, synths

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Tom Schroeder Saint Paul, Minnesota

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