?Interrobang! · Track 67 · middle
Do the Dead Read What We Never Sent
OBJECT (intimate, what Sisukiro found): letters never sent to a loved one who died. OWNER (re-linked by Sisukiro): Duck Decoy Dan — warden of the swans from the River Thames; note the irony of the name. FOUND AT: Enderby Island, deep in the subantarctic. THE (UN)LIKELY STORY & THE UNANSWERABLE QUESTION: Dan counts the Crown's swans though he's Duck Decoy; left unsent letters to his dead on a subantarctic island full of birds. Do the dead read what we never sent?
Lyrics
Enderby Island.Eight degrees Celsius.The smell of wet tussock grass and salt.An oilskin pouch, wedged between rocks, slick with horizontal rain.Your heart, Dan. Left here.They called you Duck Decoy Dan.A funny name for the Warden of the Swans.Counting the living property of the Crown on the River Thames.Every white neck, every perfect feather.Accounted for.But inside this pouch, the count is different.Folded paper, heavy with ink.Words you couldn't send.A conversation with a ghost, carried all the way south.Do the dead read what we never sent?Does the wind carry the ink across the water?Do they hear the words we only wrote down?Left in the loneliest places, hoping for an answer?You came so far from London.Past the failed rabbit farm from 1890.Another story of something that couldn't survive here.Did you see your own story in the bones of that failure?You left these pages for the Hooker's sea lions to guard.For the yellow-eyed penguins to witness.A final post office at the bottom of the world.Do the dead read what we never sent?Does the salt spray lift the meaning from the page?Do they feel the weight of the paper we carried?Left in the wilderness, turning a new age?I'm holding them now, Dan.The letters are addressed to no one I can find.Just a name, maybe a memory.Every "I'm sorry."Every "I miss you."Every "If I had only..."The swans on the Thames are beautiful decoys.But these words... these are the real bird.The one that flew from your chest and landed here, in the cold.The ink hasn't run.The question is still clear.I'm folding them back up.Putting them back in the oilskin.Leaving them for the wind.Are you reading this?