The Atlanta Botanical Garden

Lyrics

[Intro]
Forty feet up.
The rail is cold against my hand.
It’s December.

[Verse 1]
Down there, the city leased the land in 1976.
Thirty acres carved from the park's wild edge.
Mary Mills drew the first lines on the map.
A formal answer to the meadow's sleep.
Down there, the orchid house holds its breath at seventy degrees.
But up here…

[Chorus]
Up here on the Canopy Walk.
It's always 2010 on this bridge.
Steel spine and wood ribs, holding us above the forest floor.
The city breathes a different air through these branches.
Pine resin and cold metal, and the long view home.

[Verse 2]
Down there, the glass house.
Edward Larrabee Barnes's jewel box, built in 1989.
The Fuqua Conservatory, a whole other climate under glass.
I remember the line in July 2015.
Twelve thousand people waiting for a forty-eight-hour flower.
A smell of rot and burnt sugar, a heat you could almost see.

[Chorus]
But up here on the Canopy Walk.
It's always 2010 on this bridge.
Steel spine and wood ribs, holding us above the forest floor.
The city breathes a different air through these branches.
Pine resin and cold metal, and the long view home.

[Bridge]
And when the sun goes down, the lights come on.
A new map of stars, a million of them, strung from oak to pine.
A low sixty-hertz hum in the wire.
Not the velvet dark of the Fox Theatre ceiling…
This is a constellation we can walk right through.
A million little promises against the coming cold.

[Outro]
My hand on the rail.
Your breath beside me.
The skyline glowing just past the trees.
Forty feet up.
We're still walking.
Still walking.