Bruce Cockburn How I Spent My Fall Vacation Lyrics

How I Spent My Fall Vacation Lyrics

Sun went down looking like the eye of God

Behind icy mist and stark bare
trees

Inside the dim empty cinema two guys in leather jackets

Glance at each other and shiver

"They never built these places with
winter in mind"

Out the window down the gray road

You can see old
walled monastery

Now become a barracks for the paramilitary police 



I saw an old lady's face once on a Japanese train

Half lit,
rich with soft luminosity

She was dozing straight upright head bobbing
almost imperceptibly

Wheels were playing fast in 98 time

Her
husband's friendly face suddenly folded up in a sneeze

Across the
straight a volcano flew a white smoke flag of surrender 



In a
Roman street on a full moon night

I was sick and there was a young cop in
a circle of yellow light

As we drew near he snapped the safety off his
machine pistol

And slid a trembling finger to the trigger

I wanted
to say something calming but couldn't catch his eye

He didn't want
contact -- he was trained to see movement

"Well don't shoot me, man, I'm
a graceful slow dancer

I'm just a dream to you not real at all" 



I wonder if I'll end up like Bernie in his dream

A displaced
person in some foreign border town

Waiting for a train part hope part
myth

While the station changes hands

Or just sitting at home
growing tenser with the times

Or like that guy in "The Seventh Seal"

Watching the newly dead dance across the hills

Or wearing this leather
jacket shivering with a friend

While the eye of God blazes at us like the
sun...