Grant Peeples: Music

• MP3 play whole song, hi-fi (broadband)

An 8 minute long break-up song

CARMEN’S TEARS

I was driving ‘cross the Everglades the other day. I had the A.M. radio on, listening to some old Havana tunes…from the days when the Casablanca fans twirled in the thick cigar smoke at the Tropicana, and dark men in white suites played dominos in the shade along the Malecon.

There was an angry black cloud boiling in the Western sky. I smelled the wet-dog smell of a coming rain; I saw the lightning bolts flame. I heard the whistle of the wind, felt the power, and heard the rumble of the thunder as my hands gripped hold of the wheel.

I saw a red tail hawk fly up from the bank of the canal that ran along the side of the road. He circled slowly beneath that black cloud in a picture frame of lightning bolts. Then he dropped something, as he rose like a kite without a string into the heavens above.

A woman named Carmen de la Guerra was singing a song called “El Dolor de Mi Amor,” And it sounded so sad, and I could feel the tremendous sense of loss that weighed on her every word. Oh, and it hit me hard, and it hit me deep. And I turned on the wipers as her tears hit my windowshield.

Way out here, beneath the rain of Carmen’s tears, where Creation seems so vast
So far away from the love we could not save, memories coming flooding from the past.

I don’t know why I became so sentimental; maybe that song and that hawk and that storm were…all just coincidental; but the rain come down so hard I could hardly see.



I pulled over at the Reservation and parked the car beside an open thatched hut. There was an Indian woman there, sitting quietly, nursing a baby, solemn and back-straight, watching that storm as though it were a movie. Well I killed the motor but radio kept playing on.

And then my mind fogged up, the rain was pounding on the hood, I knew what I to do I just didn’t know I could. But then I wept like a child while Carmen kept singing her song.

Way out here, in the middle of nowhere. Everything I buried is falling from the sky
And everything I feared, like everything I held so dear
Is washed away by tears from Carmen’s eyes.



I don’t know how much time went by
before that storm passed overhead and opened the sky
to a big red sun bright as any I’d ever seen

It was as though I had awakened from a dream, and everything had changed. And I kept hearing echoes to the words I’d heard Carmen sing. And for the first time since you’d left……I really realized that you were gone.


Way out here beneath the rain of Carmen’s tears, where Creation seems so vast
So far away from the love we could not save, memories come flooding from the past. Way out here in the middle of nowhere, everything I buried is falling from the sky And everything I feared, like everything I held so dear Is washed away by tears from Carmen’s eyes