Tintin in Tibet

I sing to you

I sing to you, Geneviève

I sing to you

You don't exist

I sing to you though

When I address you, who am I talking to?

Standing in the front yard like an open wound

Repeating "I love you", to who?

I recorded all these songs about the echoes in our house now

And then I walked out the door to play them on a stage

But I sing to you

I picture you

When we first met, you were 22

I drove my truck onto the ferry to Victoria in the morning

Where we met and talked forever in your apartment with evening falling

So I brought my blankets in and slept on the floor right next to your bed

In the morning, barely awake, I saw you standing right above me

Peeling an orange and looking hungry

"Do you want some?" you asked me

And then just avalanched into me with pieces of orange

And weight and kissing and certainty

I remember you a few days later in Tofino

Where we'd driven to play a show you'd set up for us at a surf shop to no one

Then we slept in the back of my truck and got woken up by the cops

So we went down to the fishing boat dock to ask whoever for a ride

Across the water to Meares Island to just get left there for the day

And we did that and brought some food to eat and went through the big trees

Abandoned and in love, totally insane, apart from the rest of the world

We had finally found each other in the universe

Lying on the rocks, waiting for the boat to come pick us up

I read the one book we had with us aloud

With my head on your lap, sinking into you

Tintin in Tibet in French

And we thought of devotion and snow and distant longing in the Himalayan air

High and cold, with a bell ringing out

And then right before you died, thirteen years later in our house

I remember through your gasping for oxygen, you explained

That you were thinking about that high, cold air

Wrapping the globe, singing above the mountains of the Gods

And I do picture you there, molecules dancing

But I'd rather you were in the house watching the unfolding everyday life

Of this good daughter we made

Instead of being scattered by the wind for no reason

So I sing to you