Eleanor

not positive, but this is what i hear in the last verse:

bound for new life, masons thunder east is over, west is under found the hum of drag race runners comfort flaring in my sheets now we'll head back up to Monmouth where the kids are seldom honest cross the borders, past the train yards i will enter just to breathe but the time will come for lovers we will cradle one another we will wander past the distance for our merry mouths to meet

I think about this song a lot. My personal feelings, but I almost feel like this song is about suicide and the hero's journey of the soul that follows.

'I was wasted on the trigger' of course implies death by gun.

'In the river I was waiting' (and the subsequent lines) imply some kind of post-death limbo. It conjures up images of the River Styx and waiting for a sort of rebirth, which is hunted at later in the song.

Eleanor is kind of an interesting figure in the song, and it implies that somehow the singer find redemption through Eleanor. 'Bathing me in blessings that confronted as I cried' Eleanor is asking questions, and the answers to the questions determine the singers fate (damnation, redemption, rebirth etc. In this case, I think it's rebirth).

The tower imagery 'with remains if every sacrifice inside' sounds a little like the ancient Egyptian belief, except instead of measuring guilt, they're looking at contributions or 'sacrifices'; things that are done selflessly, sacrifices we make in life to accomplish things: these are being weighed to determine the singers place in the next life).

This next part is where the singer is thinking things are not going in their favor, but there's a sort of acceptance to this. This is the beginning of the rebirth process. 'Oh my precious demon darlings, come to hold me, death unfold me' feels like the forces that be are coming in to make their final decision. Elenore has a part in this, she's with the singer the entire journey. She's the Virgil to the singer's Dante.

They're back in the river, the judgement is complete, but the singers fate is ambiguous at this point. The signer views this at a stagnation of sorts (but the water ceased to bargain we are stranded where we've landed).

This is the moment of rebirth; 'watching careful the completion of the cosmos where the zygote watching sleeping sound now that i've found my dearest friend outside my door' This sounds to me like not just figurative birth, but literal birth. The mother figure is our first dear friend.

'bound for new life, masons thunder'

The rest of the song, I feel, is about the new life.

Such a great song.

I wonder which Monmouth she meant, the town or the one of the two colleges?

It's most likely about Monmouth in Wales.

"cross the river to the tower" -- the River Wye meets the River Monnow in Monmouth, and it has two bridges over both which you can cross. Since she mentions Monmouth itself, it's probably about the place in Wales.

I think the part about the “sleeping zygote” is a reference to the ending of “2001: A Space Odyssey”.