The Valley Below

I was thinkin' about turquoise, I was thinkin' about gold //

I was thinkin’ about diamonds and the world’s biggest necklace
As we rode through the canyons, through the devilish cold
I was thinkin’ about Isis, how she thought I was so reckless

Bob Dylan // “Isis”

One of my favorite songs from one of my favorite Dylan albums. All that thinkin' ends up just thoughts, of course, other than Isis. The song builds a world and tears it down, in its heart an unmarked grave, and as its whole a mystical lovers' reunion. The gold here is part of its central deception. At the Rolling Thunder Revue, Bob says “this is a song about marriage” (song begins around 19:00). Of course it is.

Over the past few days, motivated by ideas from this post, I’ve been caught in the lyrics, melodies, and moods of gold-mentions from my favorite songwriters. These are, in no particular order, the ones that rose to the surface when I went “thinkin' about gold”. They’ve populated my soul for years, as lyrics do, being at work in my memory and imagination. In this respect, I consider them “mine”. Each one is worth multiple essays' worth of consideration—but poetry can do better justice, so I’ve tried to keep these notes brief.

(I’m very sorry for all the youtube links, including the commercials. I wish there was some other way.)

In the process of re-surfacing, re-listening, and re-considering, I realized a few things. First, that I should study written song lyrics with more sustained attention. They are at least as influential and instructive as the written words that have sculpted my sensibility. Working with them in writing engages different capacities.

Second, I don’t listen to pop music; I listen to poetry.

Those men who lust for land 
And for riches strange and new 
Who love those trinkets of desire 
Oh, they never will have you

And they’ll never know the gold 
Or the copper in your hair 
How could they weigh the worth of you so rare

Suzanne Vega // “World Before Columbus”

I’ve always loved this song, shaded as it is by the colonial frame. It makes me wonder who she wrote it for. From the album Nine Objects of Desire, but I like the more recent acoustic release, where she includes it among songs about Family.

As often with Vega, there’s an understated irony at work; here, with the simultaneous liberation and re-objectification of the beloved. I find myself relating to that bittersweet bind. Loving an indigenous person from a (once- and neo-) colonized land, and writing poetry about that person (or writing poetry about my “new home”), inevitably invokes the incriminating history.

How to love in a postcolonial world? It’s an open question. Again, explicitly related to power and the image.

I was born like this, I had no choice 
I was born with the gift of a golden voice 
And 27 angels from the Great Beyond 
They tied me to this table, right here, in the tower of song

Leonard Cohen // “Tower of Song”

The irony in this song is overt and complex, like the taste of a very expensive booze. His later lyrics do this to me all the time. I sit and savor them for years, decades, and wonder who is this thing that they come from? How do you boast, and self- and other-cut, all at the same time, with such contemplative panache? I feel personally like I have a great deal to learn from elder-Cohen sensibility, being an unripe wine myself—grape juice, even. There’s an abandoned Cohen love poem in my drafts because I just couldn’t manage it . . . yet.

“I’m going on down to Yasgur’s farm 
I’m gonna join in a rock ‘n’ roll band 
I’m gonna camp out on the land 
I’m gonna try an' get my soul free”

We are stardust 
We are golden 
And we’ve got to get ourselves 
Back to the garden

Joni Mitchell // “Woodstock”

No overt irony, but the yearning remains uncanny . . . so uncanny. Interesting to know that she missed the event and wrote the song in a hotel room (see notes), after seeing footage of the festival on tv. This gold has been displaced. The lyrics describe naive delusion and an eerily impoverished hallucination. To me, it feels like she doesn’t quite believe, being however in genuine awe of the moment. The closing darkens the frame: “We are stardust / Billion year old carbon / We are golden / Caught in the devil’s bargain.” The passage of time has only deepened the sense of surreality—how has that movement unwound? Where did it go? Where did we go? —not the garden, I think.

You told me once
Gardens, yes, they know
Death is not the end and
Flowers burn to gold

Tori Amos // “Flowers Burn to Gold”

No irony here, just pure love and consolation. It’s not the only Tori song about gold but this one lives inside me. It’s pretty clearly about her mother who passed away. Live version here with a few vocal flaws but a legendary performance in tandem with a gorgeous cover. Here’s where to go when your open heart needs a good, hard cry; which, it probably does, and you just weren’t aware.

Whereas the others are examples of ironic gold, this lyric is, similar to my own kind of way, an example of liminal gold.

I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm 
Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm

Leonard Cohen // “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”

Honorable mention; neither ironic nor liminal, a relic of the younger Cohen. “Sleepy golden storm” describes my own hair very accurately, and possibly my own self. (That’s Leonard, always looking at me, one last time.) I can’t listen to this 2008 live version without tears. I saw him play on that tour.

If you a pussy, you get popped, you a goofy, you a opp
Don’t you come around my way, you can’t hang around my block
And I just checked my accounts, turns out, I’m rich, I’m rich, I’m rich
I put my hand above my hip, I bet you dip, he dip, she dip
I say I get the money and go, this shit is hot like a stove
My pussy glitter is gold, tell that lil' bitch play her role
I just arrive in a Rolls, I just came up in a Wraith
I need to fill up the tank, no, I need to fill up the safe
I need to let all these hoes know that none of their n-ggas is safe

Cardi B // “Bodak Yellow”

Her pussy glitter is gold—yes. Also, liminal. To be clear, money means something different to Cardi B than it does to me. I think hip-hop appreciation, for most white people, requires a kind of cultural translation. It’s often poetry from a warzone, more like the Illiad than a folksinger out of the 60’s. But its ethics are just as serious, if not more sensitive to the urgencies of material and psychic insecurity. Cardi B doesn’t dance now, she speaks armor of the feminine. In doing so, her verse has impacted the very course of my life. I wouldn’t be where I am today without Invasion of Privacy. I shouldn’t forget that.

Which reminds me—

Joanni, Joanni wears a golden cross 
And she looks so beautiful in her armour 
Joanni, Joanni blows a kiss to God 
And she never wears a ring on her finger

Kate Bush // “Joanni”

Kate makes gold neither ironic nor liminal, but mythic. Another artist whose work provides psychic armor. This song, and its album, have sustained me through depths, and I have no way to describe it better than that. One might say that an earlier provision of armor (by fire!) was “Lily”, and it’s delightful to think that Yeats would probably recognize that invocation. But if any of these lyrics demonstrate the power that Yeats claims, by the gold of Byzantium, it’s here . . . Joanni, surrounded by skies and seas of honey. The beauty of Aerial remains uncontained.

One final mention (for now)—

An afro
A pharoah
I can’t go
You said so
But threads that are golden
Don’t break easily

Tori Amos // “Beauty Queen - Horses”

Tori’s muse isn’t often straightforward, but this is the opening statement on Boys for Pele, which was the most formative album of my teenage years. This poem was not an intentional reference. But unless I caught it in some childhood version of the Ariadne myth . . . BFP is where I first heard of a golden thread.

Here is a third thing that I realized, going back through these songs, related to meter and rhyme. All of my music listening, which has been a constant conditioning, influences the poetry I love, which is often written in metric verse; and the poetry I write, which, for better or worse, often comes with some kind of meter and rhyme. Why does it come that way? Metric poetry supplies—and is supplied by—its own musicality. Metric verse is, like faith, a negotiation with the sacred imagination, sacrificial and empowering at once. In this, my day and age, I know no other way to grow a voice.

But don’t listen to me, I’m grape juice. Which reminds me, the fruit described at the end of the homonymous husband poem is jambu air, which translates as water guava. Speaking of self-disclosure . . . Prose begins to feel like a kind of graphic incontinence. So, enough.

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One final note, I adore this, “saving phenomena” from Angles Morts. Who does the work daily, and whose daemonic words, neither dead nor blind, daily conspire with my own. In case it isn’t obvious, poetic replies are this blog’s love language.🤍

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