whitMonday - Eli Mercer

[Intro]
[solo gusle, bowed and rasping, over a low sea drone]
(hey... ohh...)

[Verse 1 - chanted]
What is that white upon the green water?
Is it the snow, or is it terns wheeling?
Were it the snow, the sun would have had it;
were it the terns, they'd have dived for pilchards.
It is not snow, nor is it the seabirds —
it is the sand of Whitehaven, famous,
and forty boats anchored on its shoulder,
all of them there, and not one of them here.

[Verse 2 - chanted]
Hear me, brothers, of Mercer the wanderer,
denim-shouldered, the singer with no mother.
Out of a mound, the way the scrubfowl hatches,
warmed by the rot of every song before him,
he dug himself out on a Monterey Monday,
flew the same day, and never learned to nest.

[Chorus]
Pix or it didn't happen —
so it didn't, and it did.
Left the phone on the boat, said it might get wet;
that's the reason that I give.
Nobody saw it but the sandflies,
and they wrote it on my skin.

[Verse 3 - chanted]
He flew out west, which is somebody's east,
over the line where a Monday goes missing,
down to Airlie, where the backpacks gather
and every dinghy is steered by a visa,
to a passage named by a captain a day out —
Cook's Sunday was a Monday all along,
though Ngaro eyes had watched nine thousand years.

[Verse 4 - chanted]
Up Tongue Point track in the heat of the afternoon,
grass trees holding their spears up to the sky,
hoop pines kept small by salt wind and thin ground,
and he did not know what the path would show him —
that was the gift, to come without the picture —
till the inlet opened, sand and sea in plaits,
and the whole of it was nobody's but his.

[Chorus]
Pix or it didn't happen —
so it didn't, and it did.
Left the phone on the boat, said it might get wet;
that's the reason that I give.
Nobody saw it but the sandflies,
and they wrote it on my skin.

[Post-Chorus]
Didn't want the phone to drown,
so I went under instead.

[Verse 5 - chanted, frame drum quickens]
Whale and her calf, rolling slow off the headland;
a tan sea snake, a kilometre from anywhere;
turtles lifting old heads to breathe in the shallows;
rays in the runnels, slate-grey, waiting on the tide;
mackerel and mahi tearing the silver pilchards,
and the terns above them, taking what falls;
two sea eagles nesting high over the gully,
a drongo scolding, a scrubfowl scratching its cradle —
and the fish. And the fish. And the fish.

[Verse 6 - chanted, slower]
What is that dark upon the sandy bottom?
Is it a cloud's shade, or a ray at rest there?
Were it a cloud, it would have passed over;
were it a ray, it would have lifted, flying.
It is no cloud, and it is not a ray, brothers —
it is the dugong, or it is my wanting.

[Instrumental Break]
[gusle solo, rasping, frame drum steady]

[Verse 7 - chanted]
Next day they sailed past the white sand without stopping,
forty hulls swinging, forty circles crossing,
tents on the beach like a crop of bright pixels,
and they held their course for a bay with no name in it,
where a boat can turn all night upon its chain
and foul nobody, and nobody watching.

[Bridge - gusle drops out, voice close and dry]
The man who proved a song is never the same song
had to cut it into wax to make his case.
So press me, brothers — I'm the kind that can't get wet —
and I'll sing you all the sea I'll never swim.

[Final Chorus]
Pix or it didn't happen —
so it didn't, and it did.
Give me swing room, give me a bay with no name,
and a reason I can give.
Didn't want the phone to drown,
so I went under instead.

[Outro - chanted, instruments thin to gusle]
I was not there. I had it from a sailor.
He left his phone, so all he had was telling.
Now it is yours, and it will change in the singing —
that's how a song stays true.
[Fade Out]