[verse 1] I knew you first by the thawing ground Where winter’s mouth gave spring its sound You moved like smoke through cedar trees Like something old the earth would keep. [verse 2] And I have held you through borrowed light Through fields gone bare and hollow nights Through the slow collapse of summer leaves And the quiet weight of what grief means. [chorus] I will love you past the bloom Past the body and the room Past the breath the dusk unspools Past the hands the river cools When you are root and rain made still When your name runs soft through stone and hill I will find you where the dark turns fertile And love you down through loam and marrow. [verse 3] I loved you bent like weathered wheat When sorrow slept beneath your teeth When silence gathered at your door Like snow too deep to call back from. [verse 4] And when your face begins to fade Like moonlight thinning on the lake I’ll trace you in the bending grass In all the things that come to pass. [chorus] I will love you past the flame Past the ash, past spoken name Past the blood the bramble keeps Past the frost, past rooted sleep When the hillside folds you in its hymn And the birch trees learn the shape you’ve been I will stay where wild things borrow And love you down through loam and marrow. [bridge] So when my bones go winter-white Lay me low beside your night Where no stone asks and no bell warns Just thistle bloom and foxglove thorns And the deep, dark choir below Threads us where the roots all go. [final chorus] I will love you when we’re thinned To weather, seed, and feathered wind When all our days are feather dust And all our vows are leaf and rust For love was never flesh alone But the quiet growing through the bones So when the earth calls in her furrow I’ll meet you there in loam and marrow. [outro] Beneath the fern, beneath the flood Beyond the iron, past the blood Where blackbirds pull the dusk apart. I will know you by the rain-bent pine By the roots that braid through yours and mine Still beating… [final line, voice only] In loam and marrow. In loam and marrow.
