Grain

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a plane shaving wood, a beam knocked twice)
Xylology. Wood. Not trees — wood. The material after the tree has stopped.

[Verse 1]
There is a beam in the roof of a barn in Herefordshire
and a man with a hand lens can tell you the tree was felled
in the winter of 1387, and he can tell you the winter,
not the year — the WINTER — because the last ring is incomplete,
and the tree stopped growing in the autumn and was cut before spring,
and it has been holding up that roof ever since, doing its job.

[Chorus]
Grain. Every ring a year, and the width of it is the weather.
A wide one is a good summer. A tight one is a drought.
A whole climate record, standing up, holding a roof on,
in a barn, in a field, that nobody thinks about at all.
Grain. Six hundred and forty summers, in order, in a beam.
Somebody studies this. Somebody read the barn.

[Verse 2]
And they can MATCH them. That's what gets me about the field.
Every region has a master sequence — a fingerprint of centuries
of good years and bad years shared by every tree that stood there —
so a plank from a shipwreck can be traced to a forest and a decade
because its rings agree with a cathedral roof three hundred miles away.
Trees that never met, agreeing about the summer of 1540.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
There are violins that are loud because of a cold century.
The Little Ice Age made the spruce grow slow and dense and even,
and Stradivari bought the wood that grew in those bad decades,
and that is possibly why they sound like that, and possibly not,
and people have argued about it for two hundred years,
which is exactly the sort of argument this field is made of.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the beam, knocked once more)
Winter of 'eighty-seven.
Still up there. Still doing it.