There's a black crow sitting across from me his wiry legs are crossedĪ black crow is a difficult symbol to unpack, but I think that the crow represents death. The use of the word "frozen" recalls the "paralyzed" from the first verse, and he reveals that it is her death that has him trapped and unable to move forward, lost in grief. She was his sun, and he associates her with home.Īnd here he finally digs down far enough that he can come as directly as he ever will to telling us that the source of his grief is the death of his wife. This was more than a break up, or the loss of a girlfriend, but a wife, a companion. That he places the fountain in his front yard also suggests that his loss was at home - she lived with him. For him, the source of his hope, the place where he could believe his wishes could come true, has become rusted with disuse. Here the fountain suggests a place where you could throw in a coin and make a wish and have hope it will come true. The fountain in the front yard is rusted out It takes a wrenching of muscle and sinew for him to try to face the sun again, because the sun - his source of light, heat, happiness, brightness, tomorrow, daylight, has disappeared and he has had to find a new sun. He is trying to twist - a turn in another direction from the one he has been moving in, but twist suggests that the turn is not smooth or easy. Maybe the contraction is actually supposed to stand in for a compressed "I have been" twisting to the sun. The grammar on this line seems to be off, or at least the punctuation, but it is from the liner notes for the lyrics. I've twisting to the sun I needed to replace The racks suggests torture, and the idea of carrying stacks of something, and wanting to unburden it returns to the idea that the song is one where he seeks relief from grief. I've had the hardest time trying to discover the meaning of the chorus. In the back with your racks and you're un-stacking your load In the back and the racks and the stacks are your load On your back with your racks as the stacks as your load Here he tells us how he has avoided the excavation thus far, and why he is paralyzed with his grief: he has been trying to stay numb to it, literally through alcohol, or figuratively by disengaging from his too painful reality. He returns to the gambling metaphor: money symbolizes hope of recovery, of avoiding the loss, of coming out with something other than the worst possible outcome. His mind knows exactly what has happened and why, but he cannot reach an understanding for his heart. He finds it hard to find and excise his pain, because he knew he was losing her - again a suggesting of a lingering illness, and her slow slide away from him. This line seems to refer back to the excavation of the source of his grief, in an effort to finally reach peace or some understanding of his grief and loss. He just had to keep betting, both of them did, that the next bet would pay off. Perhaps he lost her to an illness like cancer, where they tried treatment after treatment, to no avail, and she just kept slipping away. I keep throwing it down two-hundred at a timeĪgain, he chokes and pauses on "two." He begins to build a metaphor of gambling and losing, over and over, at high stakes. It isn't just tears, but overwhelming waves of crying, like he will never stop.Īt the same time, he finds himself stuck and unable to move forward, which is why he is driven to excavate and dig out the source of his pain, so he might reach understanding and peace with it. Pouring rain suggests overwhelming sadness. He has suffered a loss that will mark the rest of his life as Before and After.
This line suggests the cataclysmic nature of what he's suffered. He can't even bear to think of the homophone for "two" because it overwhelms him for a moment that he is now one, forever, having lost her. There is a long pause between "to" and "day" in the line, as if he is stumbling on the syllable "to." For me, this is the first suggestion that the song is about the death of his lover. Kumran is the place where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls, so there is a suggestion of the holy about this "excavation" of himself, a search for the sacred and the divine, for meaning beyond just the events he's experienced.
The line as a whole suggests that the song is an attempt for him to get to the heart of what he has lost and what meaning he has left. Once again, a poetry major listens to a song.
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