The dulcimer opens alone, setting the whole song’s repeating figure before the voice enters. The pattern is not an intro that disappears; it is the song’s main formal material, already giving the later verses their measure and return point.

The first vocal span moves from the lost-love exchange into the bar/coaster image, then widens into the Canada map and the first full refrain. The arrival of you are in my blood like holy wine changes the verse from recollection into declaration, and I could drink a case of you becomes the song’s central returning form. The still-on-my-feet tag extends the refrain instead of closing it quickly.

A short dulcimer passage holds the same pattern after the first refrain. Its job is reset, not contrast: it clears space for the next entry while confirming that the song will continue by return and variation rather than by a new instrumental section.

The second vocal entry shifts from remembered dialogue to self-description: the lonely painter, fear, attraction, and the recalled line about love touching souls. The refrain material returns later in the span, but altered by what precedes it; the repeated blood/holy-wine and still-on-feet ideas now carry the sense of the other person leaking into the singer’s own lines.

The next verse brings in another woman who resembles and knows the absent figure. Her warning, be prepared to bleed, withholds the refrain just long enough to make the return feel less like repetition and more like consequence.

The final refrain gathers the song’s main language one last time: holy wine, bitter and sweet, the case of you, still on my feet. After the last tag, the voice leaves and the dulcimer continues briefly on its own, reducing the song back to the figure that began it before the recording fades into silence.