Pollinating the Dreams We Drop

Lyrics

Yarlung Tsangpo.
Five thousand meters down.
The river sound never stops.
And in the cold mist, wedged between wet rocks... this.
A board of pins and paper dreams.

Grounded Gary, they called you.
But I found your sky.
Cut from magazines, glued to corkboard.
A picture of a ship on a sea you never saw.
An architect's blueprint for a house never built.
Faded ink, a list of cities... Paris, Rio, Kyoto.
Every pin a tiny anchor holding a ghost.
Left here, in the deepest canyon on Earth.
Where the sun is a rumor.

You climbed the palms at dawn, a bag of pollen at your waist.
Giving life to a fruit that wasn't yours to taste.
You pollinated another's future, branch by branch, by hand.
But what about the seeds you kept, in a forgotten land?
Who tends the dreams we drop? Who tends the dreams we abandon?

I can see you in Basra, the air thick with heat.
Ten meters up a Phoenix dactylifera.
Your hands sure on the rough bark.
A tradition old as the Ottoman tax-man, 1570.
This little cloth bag of dust, of life.
You looked out over the groves, toward a horizon you couldn't cross.
Did you think of this board then?
Of the heights you couldn't reach, even when you were so high above the ground?

You climbed the palms at dawn, a bag of pollen at your waist.
Giving life to a fruit that wasn't yours to taste.
You pollinated another's future, branch by branch, by hand.
But what about the seeds you kept, in a forgotten land?
Who tends the dreams we drop? Who tends the dreams we abandon?

From the top of the world in an Iraqi grove,
to the bottom of the world in a Tibetan canyon.
One was a climb toward the sun.
This was a descent into silence.
You carried these pictures all that way.
Just to let them go.
Just to leave them for the river's roar to answer.

The paper is peeling at the corners.
The ink is running from the mist.
Gary, your dreams are getting wet.
Does anyone hear them?