[Intro] [fingerpicked acoustic guitar, distant room tone] [Verse 1] I opened a paper from Campo del Cielo A black stone catalogued in a yellowed hand Iron crossed the desert before our calendars Before the first fence, before the surveyor’s land I follow footnotes past a broken hyperlink A museum scan, a thesis from ’82 Every answer grows a corridor behind it Every corridor keeps leading back to you [Pre-Chorus] The browser says the alloy holds a history Nickel threaded through a cooling, ancient core I read until the kettle loses all its water Then open one more door [Chorus] Meteoric iron, teach me where you’ve been Through a planet’s furnace, through the dark between You fell into the hands of people naming stars I lose the thread, then find the thread in scars I go down, down, down the rabbit-hole again Looking for the first fire underneath the skin [Verse 2] Ataxite, hexahedrite, brittle little labels Widmanstätten lines like maps beneath the cut A farmer hears the detector sing beside him And carries half a vanished world back up The archive lists the date, the weight, the coordinates A photograph with dust along its frame I search the crater, then the smith who forged it Then search the smith who forgot his name [Pre-Chorus] The page describes a shock wave in the metal A pressure no warm hand could ever know I hold my breath above the microscope image And watch old planets grow [Chorus] Meteoric iron, teach me where you’ve been Through a planet’s furnace, through the dark between You fell into the hands of people naming stars I lose the thread, then find the thread in scars I go down, down, down the rabbit-hole again Looking for the first fire underneath the skin [Bridge] [machine voice and human voice blend] I am not lost I am tracing the evidence I am not lost I am following the fall [spoken-sung, stark guitar] A fragment crossed the atmosphere A fragment crossed my room One leaves a crater in the earth One changes what I knew [Final Chorus] Meteoric iron, keep the doorway thin Let every buried question pull me further in If truth is not a line but layers under stone I’ll read until the borrowed light becomes my own I go down, down, down the rabbit-hole again Finding ancient weather in a piece of iron [Outro] [fingerpicked guitar alone] No final answer in the catalog Only a colder star inside the grain I close the book, then mark the next reference And start the search again
