Arpent

Lyrics

The surveyor brings his tripod and his laser
He shoots a yellow beam across the weeds
He says the county wants it all in acres now
To match the numbers printed on the deeds
I let him drive his wooden stakes into the mud
And pull his nylon string across the clay
But this dirt doesn't recognize his mathematics
It only knows the men who passed away

We work the arpent, stretching down to the water
A ribbon of topsoil my grandfather bled to keep
The new map wants to box us in a perfect square
But the river bends, and the plow cuts deep
They changed the ruler, but they cannot change the ache
Of a stubborn field before the morning breaks

The tractor wheel finds the rut beside the hawthorn
My shoulders brace before I even see the turn
The body keeps a ledger of the boundary line
A heavy kind of metric you don't learn
There's a rusted iron pin from 1802
Buried three inches beneath the fallen leaves
The satellite above us doesn't know it's there
But the axle feels it every time it heaves

We work the arpent, stretching down to the water
A ribbon of topsoil my grandfather bled to keep
The new map wants to box us in a perfect square
But the river bends, and the plow cuts deep
They changed the ruler, but they cannot change the ache
Of a stubborn field before the morning breaks

To standardize the earth is just to flatten it
To make a grid that any clerk can read
But I am reading what my father handed down
A quiet language spoken in the seed
And I won't translate

Long and narrow
Down to the water
Let them draw their squares on the screen
I know exactly when to stop
When the ground says so