The Buck Head: A Hunter's Mark

Lyrics

Before the pavement, before the name...
Just the red clay path.
Just the smell of resin in the heat.

Someone walks this way.
We don't have his name.
Not on a deed, not on a stone.
He carries the weight of a life just taken.
The ten-point crown, the wild, dark eye.
A hammer, a nail.
One single strike through bone and bark.
At the crossing of two trails.
Peachtree and Paces Ferry, before they had those names.

And the buck head watched.
A hunter's mark on a longleaf pine.
The antlers catching the low sun.
A silent king with a nail for a throne.
No one wrote it down.
But everyone knew the place by the sign.
The Buck's Head.
Our Buckhead.

The story is a ghost.
No photograph exists.
No letter sent home saying "I made a mark today."
The blood dried black and washed away with the summer rains.
The hide turned to leather in the Georgia sun.
Only the bone remained.
A pale compass pointing nowhere.
More real than the man who left it.
His name is wind, his name is dust.

And the buck head watched.
A hunter's mark on a longleaf pine.
The antlers catching the low sun.
A silent king with a nail for a throne.
No one wrote it down.
But everyone knew the place by the sign.
The Buck's Head.
Our Buckhead.

Did you see the streetcars come?
The neon flicker on your empty gaze?
Did you hear the bass from the clubs in 1993?
Did you feel the shade when the glass towers rose?
You were a story they told themselves.
A rustic memory for a concrete corner.
A wildness they needed to believe was there.

The tree is gone.
The head is gone.
The hunter is less than a whisper.
But at Peachtree and Paces...
Sometimes, in the quiet...
You can still feel the eyes.
Still feel the mark.
Still here.