Where the river cross
crosses the lake
Where the words
Jump off my pen
and into your pages
Do you think just like that
You can divide
This
You as yours
Me as mine
to before we were Us
if the rain
Has to separate from Itself
does it say "pick out your cloud?"
pick out your cloud
If there is a Horizontal Line
that runs from the MAP
off your body
straight through the Land
shooting up
right through my heart
Will this Horiztonal Line
when asked
know how to find
Where you end
where I begin
"pick out your cloud"
How Light can play
and form a Ring of Rain
that can change bows into arrows
(I found a thrill)
Who we were
isn't lost
Before
we were Us
Indigo
is his own Blue
always knew this
if the rain
Has to separate from Itself
does it say
"pick out your cloud"
pick out your cloud
If there is a Horizontal Line
that runs from the MAP
off your body
straight through the Land
shooting up
right through my heart
Will this Horiztonal Line
when asked
know how to find
Where you end
where I begin
if the rain
Has to separate from Itself
does it say
"pick out your cloud"
Tori Quotes
She leaves him on the border at Laredo and "Your Cloud" finds her travelling alone up the Mississippi to Memphis. From there she travels on to a place where thousands of Cherokees died.
She's thinking about the idea of segregation and people separating themselves from the land. Everybody has a body map, and she's trying to find hers.
She also visits the battlefields of the Civil War, before she arrives in Philadelphia where she sees the Liberty Bell -- and observes that it is cracked. [Scarlet's Walk bio]
Here she goes... trundling across the country, making her way somewhere, not quite sure where it's leading her. But she goes to the Mississippi, and not far out of Memphis is where there's a national monument, there's this acknowledgement of where a lot of the Cherokees died, didn't make it to Indian territority on the Trail of Tears, where a lot of them perished. And in "Your Cloud," so much of it is about segregation, even of a raindrop, the separation of that, the tearing apart of a tear. Extracting that, cutting that apart, the division. It's about separating that which you cannot separate, not really. There will be strands, there will be molecules. And taking those people from their land, the land of the ancestors. Taking a child away from its mother. That doesn't mean that there aren't pieces of that child still in that mother just because it's been, you know, delivered from her womb. Because a couple separates doesn't mean that there aren't pieces of him still in her. [Scarlet Stories]
Live Versions
"Your Cloud"
September 4, 2003 - West Palm Beach, Florida Welcome to Sunny Florida
"Your Cloud"
May 3, 2014 - Milan, Italy
"Your Cloud"
November 24, 2017 - Seattle, Washington
t o r i p h o r i a tori amos digital archive yessaid.com
