(after): LIVE IN THE NETHERLANDS, 11/10/2017
P.W. Elverum & Sun
Real Death
Seaweed
Ravens
When I Take Out the Garbage at Night
Emptiness pt. 2
Soria Moria
Crow
Distortion
Now Only
Crow, pt. 2
Remarks
Tintin in Tibet
Real Death
Death is real
Someone’s there and then they’re not
And it’s not for singing about
It’s not for making into art
When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb
When I walk in to the room where you were
And look into the emptiness instead, all fails
My knees fail
My brain fails
Words fail
Crusted with tears, catatonic and raw, I go downstairs and outside and you still get mail
A week after you died a package with your name on it came
And inside was a gift for our daughter you had ordered in secret
And collapsed there on the front steps
I wailed
A backpack for when she goes to school a couple years from now
You were thinking ahead to a future you must have known deep down
Would not include you though you clawed at the cliff you were sliding down,
Being swallowed into a silence that's bottomless and real
It’s dumb and I don’t want to learn anything from this
I love you
Seaweed
Our daughter is one and a half
You have been dead eleven days
I got on the boat and came to the place
Where the three of us were going to build our house if you had lived
You died though,
So I came here alone with our baby and the dust of your bones
I can't remember, were you into Canada geese?
Is it significant
These hundreds on the beach?
Or were they just hungry
For mid-migration seaweed?
What about foxgloves
Is that a flower you liked?
I can't remember
You did most of my remembering for me
And now I stand untethered
In a field full of wild foxgloves
Wondering if you're there
Or if a flower means anything
And what could anything mean
In this crushing absurdity
I brought a chair from home
I'm leaving it on the hill
Facing west and north
And I poured out your ashes on it
I guess so you can watch the sunset
But the truth is I don't think of that dust as you
You are the sunset
Ravens
In October 2015, I was out in the yard
I’d just finished splitting up the scrap 2x4s into kindling
I glanced up at the half moon, pink, chill refinery cloud light
Two big black birds flew over, their wings whooshing and low
Two ravens (but only two)
Their black feathers tinted in the sunset
I knew these birds were omens but of what, I wasn’t sure
They were flying out toward the island where we hoped to move
You were probably inside
You were probably aching, wanting not to die, your body transformed
I couldn’t bear to look, so I turned my head west like an early death
Now I can only see you on the fridge in lifeless pictures
And in every dream I have at night and in every room I walk into like here,
Where I sit the next October,
Still seeing your eyes, pleading and afraid, full of love
Calling out from another place because you’re not here
I watched you die in this room, then I gave your clothes away
I’m sorry
I had to
And now I’ll move
I will move with our daughter
We will ride over water with your ghost underneath the boat
What was you is now burnt bones and I cannot be at home
I’m running
Grief flailing
The second time I went to Haida Gwaii was just me and our daughter
Only one month after you died
My face was still contorted
Driving up and down, boots wet inside, aimless and weeping
I needed to return to the place where we discovered that childless,
We could blanket ourselves in the moss there for our long lives
But when we came home, you were pregnant
And then our life together was not long
You had cancer and you were killed and I’m left living like this
Crying on the logging roads with your ashes in a jar
Thinking about the things I’ll tell you
When you get back from wherever it is that you’ve gone
But then I remember death is real
And I’m still here in Masset
It’s August 12th, 2016
You’ve been dead for one month and three days and we are sleeping in the forest
There is sand still in the blankets from the beach where we released you from the jar
When we wake up all the clothes that we left out are cold and damp just from the air permeating
The ground opens up
Surrounded by growth
Nurse logs with layers of moss and life, young cedars, the sound of water,
Thick salal, and god-like huckleberries
The ground absorbs and remakes whatever falls
Nothing dies here
But here is where I came to grieve, to dive into it with you, with your absence
but I keep picking you berries
When I Take Out The Garbage At Night
When I take out the garbage at night
I'm not with you then, exactly
I'm with the universe
And with the lighting and thunder coming in over the mountains
But when I walk back into the house
Looking up at the window from the back step
The dark window of the room that you died in
The big empty room on the second floor
Cold because I won't close the window
Just in case something still needs to leave
I stand in the yard and look up
And the dark rectangle blares your face
All of our moments condensed into a thunderclap
When I take out the garbage at night
And then have to go back in and live on
Emptiness, Pt. 2
The feeling of being in the mountains is a dream of self-negation
To see the world without us,
How it churns and blossoms without anyone looking on
It's why I've gone on and on and why I've climbed up alone
But actual negation,
When your person is gone
And the bedroom door yawns
There is nothing to learn
Her absence is a scream saying nothing
Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about
Back before I knew my way around these hospitals
I would like to forget and go back into imagining
That snow shining permanently alone
Could say something to me true and comforting
Soria Moria
Slow pulsing red tower lights
Across a distance, refuge in the dust
All my life I can remember longing
Looking across the water and seeing lights
When I was five or six, we were camping in the islands in July
The tall yellow grass and the rose hips fragrant
After sunset, island beyond island
Undulating and familiar, not far from home
With my fragrant, whittled, cedar drift wood dagger in the mildew canvas tent
I saw fireworks many miles away but didn't hear them
And I felt a longing, a childish melancholy
And then I went to sleep
And the aching was buried, dreaming, aging, reaching for an idea of somewhere other than this place
That could fold me in clouded yearning
For nowhere actually reachable, the distance was the point
And then when I was twenty-four
I followed this ache to an Arctic Norwegian cabin
Where I said "fuck the world" in a finally satisfying way
I stayed through the winter and emerged as an adult
Holding a letter from you, an invitation
So I flew back and drove back
And when we met in person it was instant
It didn't matter where we lived as long as we were together
And that was really true for thirteen years
And the whole time still
Slow pulsing red tower lights
Across a distance, refuge in the dust
In January, you were alive still
But chemo had ravaged and transformed your porcelain into some other thing
Something jaundiced and fucked
They put you in the hospital in Everett
So I gave the baby away and drove up and down I-5 every night
Like a satellite bringing you food that you wanted
Returning at night to sleep in our bed, cold
I went back to feel alone there
All past selves and future possibilities on hold
Well I tore through the dark on the freeway
The old yearning burning in me
I knew exactly where the road bent around
Where the trees opened up and I could see
Way above the horizon, beyond enumerable islands
The towers on top of the mountain lit up slowly, silently beaconing,
As if to say "Just keep going
There is a place where a wind could erase this for you
And the branches could white noise you back awake"
So I went back to feel alone there but cradled you in me
In the National Gallery in Oslo
There's a painting called Soria Moria
A kid looks across a deep canyon of fog at a lit up inhuman castle or something
I have not stopped looking across the water from the few difficult spots where you can see
That the distance from this haunted house where I lived to Soria Moria is a real traversable space
I'm an arrow now, mid-air
Slow pulsing red tower lights
Across a distance, refuge in the dust
Crow
Sweet kid, what is this world we're giving you?
Smoldering and fascist, with no mother
Are you dreaming about a crow?
In the middle of November we went back into the woods
Right after breakfast to see if we could see this past August's forest fire zone
On the hill above the lake, the sky was low and the wind cold
The trail was closed
At the barricade I stood listening
In my backpack you were sleeping with her hat pulled low
All the usual birds were gone or freezing
It was all silent except the sound of one crow
Following us as we wove through the cedar grove
I walked and you bobbed and dozed
Sweet kid, we were watched and followed and I thought of Genevieve
Sweet kid, I heard you murmur in your sleep
"Crow," you said, "Crow"
And I asked, "Are you dreaming about a crow?"
And there she was
Distortion
But I don't believe in ghosts or anything
I know that you are gone and that I'm carrying some version of you around
Some untrustworthy old description in my memories
And that must be your ghost taking form
Created every moment by me dreaming you so
And is it my job now to hold whatever's left of you for all time?
And to reenact you for our daughter's life?
I do remember
When I was a kid and realized that life ends and is just over
That a point comes where we no longer get to say or do anything
And then what? I guess just forgotten
And I said to my mom that I hoped to do something important with my life
Not be famous but just remembered a little more
To echo beyond my actual end
My mom laughed at this kid trying to wriggle his way out of mortality
Of the final inescapable feral scream
But I held that hope and grew up wondering what dying means
Unsatisfied, ambitious and squirming
The first dead body I ever saw in real life was my great-grandfather's
Embalmed in a casket in Everett in a room by the freeway
Where they talked me into reading a thing from the Bible
About walking through a valley in the shadow of death
But I didn't understand the words
I thought of actually walking through a valley and a shadow
With a backpack and a tent
But that dead body next to me spoke clear and metaphor-free
In December 2001
After having spent the summer and fall traveling mostly alone around
The country that was spiraling into war and mania, little flags were everywhere
I was living on the periphery as a twenty-three-year-old
Wrapped up in doing what I wanted and it was music and painting on newsprint
And eating all the fruit From the tree like Tarzan or Walt Whitman, voracious, devouring life, singing my song
Sleeping in yards without asking permission
But that December I was shaken by a pregnancy scare
From someone that I'd been with for only one night
Many states away, who I hadn't planned to keep knowing
A young and embarrassing over-confident animal night
And the terror of the idea of fatherhood at twenty-three destroyed my foundation
And left me freaked out and wandering around
Mourning the independence and solitude that defined me then
Though my life is a galaxy of subtleties
My complex intentions and aspirations do not matter at all
In the face of the crushing flow of actual time
I saw my ancestors as sad and misunderstood
In the same way that my descendants will squint back through a fog
Trying to see some polluted version of all I meant to be in life
Their recollections pruned by the accidents of time
What got thrown away and what gets talked about at night
But she had her period eventually and I went back to being twenty-three
Eleven years later I was traveling alone again
On an airplane from New Zealand to Perth, Western Australia
Very alone, so far away from you and the home that we had made
I watched a movie on the plane about Jack Kerouac
A documentary going deeper than the usual congratulations
They interviewed his daughter, Jan Kerouac, and she tore through the history
She told about this deadbeat drinking, watching Three Stooges on TV
Not acknowledging his paternity, abandoning the child
Taking cowardly refuge in his self-mythology
And when she spoke I heard your voice telling me about the adults who had
Abandoned you as a sweet kid and left you to grow precariously
And when she spoke I looked in her face and saw you looking back at me
On a tiny airplane seat screen at the bottom of the world
I saw a French-Canadian resemblance
And heard suffering echoing
A lineage of bad parents and strong daughters withstanding
And she had black hair and freckles and pale skin just like you
And she told the hard truth and slayed the gods just like you
I saw the cracks in the façade of posterity
I missed you so I went home
The second dead body I ever saw was you, Geneviève
When I watched you turn from alive to dead right here in our house
And I looked around the room and asked “Are you here?”
And you weren't and you are not here
I sing to you though
I keep you breathing through my lungs
In a constant uncomfortable stream of memories trailing out
Until I am dead too
And then eventually the people who remember me will also die
Containing what it was like to stand in the same air with me,
And breathe, and wonder why?
And then distortion
And then the silence of space
The night palace
The ocean blurring
But in my tears right now
Light gleams
Now Only
I remember looking around the hospital waiting room
Full of people all absorbed in their own personal catastrophes
All reading books like "Being Mortal," all with the look in their eyes
And I remember still feeling like, "No, no one can understand"
"No, my devastation is unique"
But people get cancer and die
People get hit by trucks and die
People just living their lives
Get erased for no reason with the rest of us watching from the side
And some people have to survive
And find a way to feel lucky to still be alive
To sleep through the night
I wrote down all the details of how my house fell apart
How the person I loved got killed by a bad disease
Out of nowhere for no reason and me living in the blast zone
With our daughter and etcetera I made these songs
And the next thing I knew I was standing in the dirt
Under the desert sky at night outside Phoenix
At a music festival that had paid to fly me in
To play these death songs to a bunch of young people on drugs
Standing in the dust next to an idling bus
With Skrillex inside and the sound of subwoofers in the distance
I had stayed up til three talking to Weyes Blood and Father John Misty
About songwriting in the backstage bungalows
Eating fruit and jumping on the bed like lost children
Exploding across the earth in a self-indulgent, all-consuming
Wreck of ideas that blot out the stars
To be still alive felt so absurd
People get cancer and die
People get hit by trucks and die
People just living their lives get erased for no reason
With the rest of us averting our eyes
When I was leaning on Skrillex's tour bus waiting for the hotel shuttle in the middle of the night
I barely knew who I was
I looked up and saw Orion wielding a club and a shield
And there you were again:
Majestic dead wife
As my grief becomes calcified, frozen in stories
And in these songs I keep singing, numbing it down
The unsingable real memories of you
And the feral eruptions of sobbing
These waves hit less frequently
They thin and then they are gone
You are gone and then your echo is gone
And then the crying is gone
And what is left of this merchandise?
This is what my life feels like now
Like I got abruptly dropped off on the side of the road
In the middle of a long horrible ride
In a hot van that was too full of confident chattering dudes
And the sound of tires receding
Taking in the night air, I say
"Now only"
Crow, pt. 2
A crow that's being dreamed
By a child who's being carried through the forest
Sleeping, wondering in her twilight half-awareness
Where her mother went
I know that you died
But in this child's crow dream you survive
Beneath layers of magical symbolic wild animals
Inhabiting the edges of our fogged-over consciousnesses
Grasping for something to hold
Something old
Like a name cut into a stone
Or a bird that will make eye contact
That's where you live now
Or at least that's where I hold you
And we're still here without you
Sleeping and the sun's coming up
In the ruins of our household, we wake up again
Coming back into this
Every day that comes, the echo of you living here gets quieter
Obscured by the loud wind of us now
Wailing and moaning for you
But also living, talking about school
Making food, just surviving and still containing love
Waking up again, the baby that you knew is now a kid
And when she looks at me with your eyes the shape of almonds
I am stirred inside and reemerge
I go downstairs and turn on the CBC, and make some coffee,
And boil two eggs, make two pieces of bread into toast,
Open a window, and give the child some clothes,
And get us sitting at the table
Where your chair still sits across from me, watching
I stand to put on music
Our daughter sees and asks for mama's record
And she's staring at the speaker with this look of recognition,
Putting it together that that's you singing
I'm sobbing and eating eggs again
You're a quiet echo on loud wind
But when I'm trying to, I see you everywhere
In plants, and birds, and in our daughter,
In the sun going down and coming up, and in whatever,
In the myths that used to get told around the fire
Where a seal's head pokes up through from underwater
Crossing a threshold between two worlds, yours and mine
We were skeletally intertwined once
But now I notice ravens instead
I don't see you anywhere
If you still hang in the branches
Like burnt wood, I will go out beneath
With arms reached and run my fingers through the air
Where you breathed, touching your last breath
Reaching through to the world of the gone with my hand empty
Remarks
(talking)
Tintin in Tibet
I sing to you
I sing to you, Geneviève
I sing to you
You don't exist
I sing to you, though
When I address you, who am I talking to?
Standing in the front yard like an open wound
Repeating "I love you" to who?
I recorded all these songs about the echoes in our house now
And then walked out the door to play them on a stage
But I sing to you
I picture you
When we first met, you were 22
I drove my truck onto the ferry to Victoria in the morning
Where we met and talked forever in your apartment with evening falling
So I brought my blankets in and slept on the floor right next to your bed
In the morning, barely awake, I saw you standing right above me
Peeling an orange and looking hungry
"Do you want some," you asked me
And then just avalanched into me with pieces of orange
And weight and kissing and certainty
I remember you a few days later in Tofino
Where we'd driven to play a show you'd set up for us at a surf shop to no one
Then we slept in the back of my truck and got woken up by the cops
And then so went down to the fishing boat docks to ask whoever for a ride
Across the water to Meares Island to just get left there for the day
And we did and brought some food to eat and went through the big trees
Abandoned and in love, totally insane, apart from the rest of the world
We had finally found each other in the universe
Lying on the rocks, waiting for the boat to come pick us up
I read the one book we had with us aloud
With my head on your lap, sinking into you
Tintin in Tibet in French
And we thought of devotion and snow and distant longing in the Himalayan air
High and cold, with a bell ringing out
Then right before you died thirteen years later in our house,
I remember through your gasping for oxygen, you explained that you were thinking about that high, cold air
Wrapping the globe, singing above the mountains of the gods
And I do picture you there, molecules dancing
But I'd rather you were in the house watching the unfolding everyday life of this good daughter we made
Instead of being scattered by the wind for no reason
So I sing to you