Dark

I'm playing Nick Cave's Boatman's Call a lot at the moment; its dark, churchy love songs seem so right for these short, pre-solstice days, and driving back from the Aged Ps last week I confess a few made me well up, a bit. The ice lacing the trees between Newbury and Swindon on the way down had cleared coming back to dull scrub again and it all whirred through my head, all of the things you'd expect, and a load of random nonsense besides.

I do not know a better opening line to a Track 1, Side 1 than 'I don't believe/In an interventionist God' and the words to this one, too, are - well, just perfect.

Up those stone steps I climb
Hail this joyful day's return
Into its great shadowed vault I go
Hail the Pentecostal morn

The reading is from Luke 24
Where Christ returns to his loved ones
I look at the stone apostles
Think that it's alright for some

And I wish that I was made of stone
So that I would not have to see
A beauty impossible to define
A beauty impossible to believe

A beauty impossible to endure
The blood imparted in little steps
The smell of you still on my hands
As I bring the cup up to my lips

And no God up in the sky
And no Devil beneath the sea
Could do the job that you did baby
Of bringing me to my knees

Outside I sit on the stone steps
With nothing much to do
Forlorn and exhausted, baby
By the absence of you.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - 'Brompton Oratory' (1997)