Les Visages dans la Tasse

Lyrics

[Intro]
Good morning, you.
Just you and me.

[Verse 1]
The steam makes a ghost of the windowpane.
My hands, a bracket for the warmth.
And there... in the brief life of the crema, a flicker.
An eye, I think.
A sharp cheekbone.
A mouth about to speak.
Gone before I can name it.
My brain, the little forger, stamping a passport for a phantom.
Just for a second, the room is not so empty.

[Chorus]
Oh, this pattern-seeking animal.
This fusiform hum in the dark of the skull.
It sees a face in the grain of the wood,
a god in the scorch of the toast.
It's not a miracle.
It's a lonely wire, firing in the quiet.
A desperate search for company.

[Verse 2]
Leonardo saw it, you know.
He wrote it down for his students.
Look at the stains on the wall, he said.
The cracks in the plaster.
He saw whole landscapes, terrible battles raging in a single water stain.
I see it from my window, in the clouds that pass over the rooftops of Paris.
A dragon, then a ship, then the profile of a man I almost knew.

[Chorus]
Oh, this pattern-seeking animal.
This fusiform hum in the dark of the skull.
It sees a face in the grain of the wood,
a god in the scorch of the toast.
It's not a miracle.
It's a lonely wire, firing in the quiet.
A desperate search for company.

[Bridge]
On July twenty-fifth, nineteen seventy-six,
a machine called Viking sent a postcard home.
From the Cydonia region of Mars.
And from the static, from the trick of the rock and the shadow, a face looked back.
Carl Sagan called it a survival trait.
A candle in the dark.
He said it's better to see a tiger in the grass that isn't there...
than to miss the one that is.
And now the jungle is gone.
And we look for tigers in our coffee cups.
We look for anyone at all.

[Outro]
The coffee is cold.
The faces have drowned in the dregs.
Just the bitter grounds at the bottom,
a muddy Rorschach of the morning.
I trace the rim of the cup.
Hello, you.
Hello, nobody there.