Like the Wheel

An attempt (with many hat-tips to JE):

Oh I wish I was the sparrow in your kid's eye

This whole verse sounds loving, but notice the 'your kid'. It could mean a few things, but I imagine a lover from the narrator's long-past youth, who has moved on and had children.

I could fly above his summer all day long On an island in the heart he has to carry

He wishes he could be part of that family, but is drawn most of all to the child's innocent wonder. He's been hurt, and perhaps isn't sure that he'd want to come back in the role of the lover. "Heart he has to carry" also suggests a somewhat jaded view of love.

Past the many you have let into your song

This jealousy or this regret is tied to some other lover that this woman has known.

And I said oh my lord why am i not strong

He wants to be the adult, and to try to take her back, or even move on.

Like the wheel that keeps travelers traveling on Like the wheel that will take you home

But even in saying that, he comes back to her. He is not strong, and he longs for her to come back to him, picturing her traveling far away.

And in the forest someone is whispering to a tree now "This is all I am so please don't follow me"

This isn't delusion, it's despair. This second person is alone in the woods, and trying to console himself, but he can find nothing to pull him out. He (this person) doesn't want the narrator to pay him any mind. This, and the ambiguous change of pronoun in the next line, make me think that the "someone" here is still the narrator, talking to and about himself, but I'd be curious to hear if anything made more sense.

And it's your brother in the shaft that I'm swinging

I'm lost on this. If this is the narrator talking to his love, it's not clear where in the story the brother belongs. This might make more sense in light of a better interpretation of who this "someone" is.

Please let the kindness of forgetting set me free

He is giving up. He sees no way forward, and is bound to this memory that is consuming him.

And he said oh my lord why am I not strong Like the wheel that keeps travelers traveling on Like the wheel that will take you home

"He" again, here. Curious.

In any case, he still imagines her coming "home."

And on this Sunday someone's sititng down to wonder Where the hell among these mountains will I be?

Again, "someone" in the first two lines (interpreting the second line as a quote), and "I" in the next two. Hrm.

This person is lost, but this is ambiguous. Either he's trying to find a way out, and struggling to imagine a place that he could live, or escape, or else he's resigning himself to nature.

There's a cloud behind the cloud to which I'm yelling.

Again, he's crying out to the woods. The cloud doesn't hear him, and the day is only growing darker with the growing clouds.

I could hear you sneak around so easily

We come back around. He's sure she cheated, which is why he feels he can't come back to her, he no longer trusts her, and isn't sure what she feels.

And I said oh my lord why am I not strong Like the branch that keeps hangman hanging on Like the branch that will take me home

This sounds a lot like suicide. She has her own life, and can come home from her travels, but that home cannot be with him. The narrator now sees his home in resigning himself to the mountains as a body.

I don't think I have a great sense of how the wheel fits in to this story. I don't really see the mythological connection going any farther than the wheel evoking pain. Besides that, it's elemental, it's strong, and it can take one home, either in the disillusioned routine of the narrator's life or in the lost dream where she comes back to him.