La Dispute - Elster Stares the Desert Down Lyrics

You were staring from the kitchen at the yard after work
Through the window where the owners pulled the tree from the earth and dirt
Stands piled where the earth was disturbed
You can move it toward the fence to fill the garden bed built last spring

Where you never planted anything yet?
Dying flowers in the face on the sill
Still tryna find a pattern in the scatter of leaves
Though you were never really one to have your fortune or a prophecy read

And Elster stares the desert down
Thirty miles from the center of town
And around in the night falling in like a crown
Do any missing people ever get found?
Do they ever get found?

In the back of the shed
And the things that they left, with the tools on the shelf
There's a box full of gloves, and some seeds and a kit
So you took it all out, and you brought us to the yard
And you dig

Little holes in all the rows that you made
And the dirt with the spade maybe two inches wide
And you kneel on your knees, go to lay them inside
But you lay down instead, and you slept as if dead for a week

And Elster starts addressing the crowd
In a bunker thirty feet underground
And the sound in the room is like a voice in a tomb
Echoes banging in his memory now
Now will they ever get out?

If there is a last thing I will see before I go, let that thing be
A better me
And to climb down the pile in the yard and the tree
To see how far into our future I could see

And Elster stares at night at the phone
Catatonic, alone but for the hum of the dial tone
Glowing like a ghost in the screen
When I go and I leave here, will the missing people ever find peace?

If there is a last thing I will see before I wake up, let it be
You in the bed there, fast asleep
Softly dreaming of our garden
Dreaming roses, growing older
Getting harder for our knees to bring us down to pull the weeds

The seeds start sprouting outward
Blossom has surrounded you with flowers overnight
While your life, you realized, there was peace, all the vines intertwined in a canopy
Closed and tight around you
While your legs and arms and chest
Deep and crowned in the downward, where your resurrected self
Will grow from the ground, and be flowered where you slept
Every petal will stand all the promises

Elster stares alone at the screen