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Near November

from Monkey Paw Situation by Walter Ehresman

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See video here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZGZX-aV1as

lyrics

Near November
(© 2008 Walter Ehresman)
–dedicated to Sandy Denny and Kathleen Overstreet, in memoriam


The calendar swings hard around the sun, picking up speed in its mad dash to cold, grey skies. Near November, and–as they will–my thoughts turn to you.

That song, Remember, plays–your voice a distant echo now. Beautiful, but no longer alive.......a reverberation of a long-dead bright star, fallen into an ocean’s eternity; the ripples of pain and sorrow not yet exhausted.......not yet to the shore or the far liquid horizon. Such was their strength and their depth.

A tear surprises, falls, hits the table and glistens in the window’s refracted light.

One drop, one tiny reflection, and yet in it I see the past......somehow larger and non-linear, dream-like in that I know more than I can see in these scenes. Maybe not like a dream......more like hindsight–knowledge I now have and maybe do not want. But it’s good to know......better to know than not to know, I’ve always said, no matter the cost.

Do I believe that now?

These scenes paint a pattern, inexorable and down-sloping.....and not only because I already know their ending. Your mirror was concave....or convex, something that arced your vision of yourself into a skewed, distorted frame. We could tell you, but you saw what you saw.

We could not conceive of such a distortion. We saw your spark and knew how we felt when you were near. We saw what you created, from the plumbless recesses of a heart too damaged by what filtered down from the eyes. Too susceptible to it. And we are left with that now.

Sometimes those things you’ve left behind fill the room as if you were with us still, and your art dances in our ears and in our souls. And sometimes its sadness reaches out and expands, filling the room.....filling all rooms, until we can perceive of nothing else, and we are awed by its power, and we weep to emptying at its truth, its reach, its finality.

But........sometimes.......you come to us when we’re alone, as a wisp whose passing sends a delicate gauze over the heart. And as it flutters down, to wrap and cover but all too soon dissolve into insubstantial atoms, a tear may fall.......and, in a certain light.............


--the reference in the text to the song "Remember" is one by Groove Armada, featuring extensive sampling of Sandy singing her song "Autopsy" with Fairport Convention.

credits

from Monkey Paw Situation, released May 1, 2009
--Walter Ehresman: recitation, keyboards, groove box programming and manipulations, sampling.

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Walter Ehresman San Miguel De Allende, Mexico

Called "the quintessential Austin DIY artist" by famed local disc jockey Charlie Martin , Walter Ehresman was an eccentric presence in the Austin music scene from the '80s until his 2015 move to Mexico. A prolific songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and recording artist...and a restless musical spirit, always looking for something new, expressed with fearlessly honest, socially-conscious lyrics. ... more

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