Somebody Studies This

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a library at closing: a trolley, a lamp, a door)
Every one of these is a real job. Somebody is doing it right now.

[Verse 1]
There is a woman reading the slant of a dead man's letters.
There is a man who can date a barn from a ring in a beam.
There is somebody counting pollen, three hundred grains a slide,
and somebody clapping in caves to see which ones sing back,
and thirty-odd people on this planet who can read Tangut,
and one of them is at a desk, right now, while you are here.

[Chorus]
Somebody studies this. Whatever it is — somebody does.
The seals. The eggs. The footprints. The kissing. The grass.
Not for money, God knows. Not for fame, obviously not.
Because it was there and it was interesting and nobody else would.
Somebody studies this. Somebody had to be the one.
And they were. And they are. And that is the whole album.

[Verse 2]
And the fields are small — four hundred people, or forty, or nine.
Small enough that when one of them dies, the field feels it,
and something gets harder for a decade, or gets lost,
because there was one person who could read that hand
and they did not finish the catalogue and now nobody can.
That happens. That has happened. It will happen again this year.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
I don't think it's about the pollen. I've decided that tonight.
I think it's that the world is very large and mostly unattended,
and every so often somebody stops in front of one small part of it
and says: this. I'll take this one. I'll learn this properly,
all of it, for the rest of my life, and it will not make me rich.
That's it. That's the entire impulse. That's all of them.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the library door, closing gently)
Somebody studies this.
Whatever it is. Somebody does.