A Pin-Light Bent

official lyrics from Divers

My life comes and goes.
My life comes and goes.
Short flight, free rows:
I lie down and doze.

My life came and went.
My life came and went.
Short flight; free descent.
Poor flight attendant.

But the sky, over the ocean!
And the ocean, skirting the city!
And the city, bright as a garden
(when the garden woke to meet me),
from that height was a honeycomb
made of light from those funny homes, intersected:
each enclosed, anelectric and alone.

In our lives is a common sense
that relies on the common fence
that divides, and attends,
but provides scant defense
from the Great Light that shines through a pin-hole,
when the pin-light calls itself Selfhood,
and the Selfhood inverts on a mirror
in an Amora Obscura.

But it's mine. Or, at least, it's lent.
And my life, until the time is spent
is a pin-light, bent.
It's a pin-light, bent.

Notes

Perhaps a reimagining of former airline stewardess Françoise de Moriere's inadvertent dive. In 1962, she fell to her death after being swept mid-flight out of an emergency exit door. The New York Times article ("Stewardess Is Swept Through Plane Door") on the event inspired James L. Dickey to write his famous poem, "Falling".

Other versions