Now Only
P.W. Elverum & Sun
Tintin in Tibet
Distortion
Now Only
Earth
Two Paintings By Nikolai Astrup
Crow, pt. 2
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
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"
Earth
I don't want to live with this feeling any longer than I have to
But also, I don't want you to be gone
So I talk about you all the time, including the last day that you were alive
And I hang your pictures around the house
For me to surprise myself with and cry
Everybody that used to know us seems concerned
But if they knew that when you went through my mind
I'm full of the love that illuminated our house for all those years
And made this dancing child who tears through the days
With a brilliance you would have deepened and sang along with
But you're sleeping out in the yard now
What am I saying?
No one is sleeping
You don't even have a dead body anymore, it was taken away
I went and wrote a check and got a cardboard box full of your ashes
And a little plastic bag with your necklace
And I drove back home, truly alone
I guess I didn't bury you deeply enough
When I poured out your ashes beneath the three witch hazels
That you planted in the yard a few years ago in a triangle for us
Where me and the kid were rolling in the grass the other day
And I saw actual chunks of your bones
Bleached and weathered, unerasable
You're still out there in the spring upheaving
Coming out of the ground into air
Is that exact fragment, your finger that once caressed me not that long ago?
I still can feel it
And is that other shard a piece of your skull that once contained the wild brain that used to overflow with loving?
Undiscovered and gone
And now just shrapnel remains
Earth
Another place I poured your ashes out was on a chair on top of a mountain pointed at the sunset
I went back there last week after a year has passed and noticed that the chunks of your bones that haven't been blown away
Are indistinguishable from the other pieces of animal bones brought there by coyotes, vultures, and gods
Against my will I felt a little bit of solace creeping in
While I laid there on the moss
Compost and memories
There's nothing else
I can hear Wolves in the Throne Room singing
"I will lay down my bones among the rocks and roots"
At night I sit and picture myself curled up beneath
Ten feet of water at the bottom of the lake
I imagine trout bumping against me in the low, diminished light
Holding my breath, trying to be a boulder
Eroding, to join you in re-mingling with the background
Of churned muck coalescing in the dark
But to get ground down to matter only
Eternal and dumb
Becoming not a thing
Abdicating form
Two Paintings By Nikolai Astrup
I know no one now
Now I say "you"
Now after the ground has opened up
Now after you died
I wonder what could beacon me forward into the rest of life
I can glimpse occasional moments
Gleaming like bonfires burning from across the fjord
In a painting from around 1915 called "Midsummer Eve Bonfire" by Nikolai Astrup
That shines on my computer screen in 2017 in the awful July night
The house is finally quiet and still with the child asleep upstairs
So I sit and notice the painting of bonfires on the hillside and hanging smoke
In the valleys, wrapping back up through the fjords at dusk, hovering like scarves of mist draped along the ridges
Above couples dancing in the green twilight around fires
And in the water below, the reflections of other fires from other parties illuminate the depths and glitter
Shining and alone
Everyone is laughing and there's music and a man climbs up the hill pulling a juniper bow
To throw into the fire to make some sparks rise up to join the stars
These people in the painting believed in magic and earth
And they all knew loss, and they all came to the fire
I saw myself in this one young woman in the foreground with a look of desolation
And a body that looked pregnant as she leaned against the moss covered rocks off to the side
Apart from all the people celebrating midsummer
I knew her person was gone, just like me
And just like me, she looked across at the fires from far away and wanted something in their light to say:
"Live your life and if you don't the ground is definitely ready at any moment to open up again,
To swallow you back in, to digest you back into something useful for somebody"
And meanwhile above all these Norwegians dancing in the twilight
The permanent white snow gleamed
You used to call me "Neige Éternelle"
The man who painted this girl's big black eyes, gazing, drawing the fire into herself, standing alone
Nikolai Astrup, he also died young, at 47, right after finishing building his studio at home
Where he probably intended to keep on painting his resonant life into old age
But sometimes people get killed before they get to finish all the things they were going to do
That's why I'm not waiting around anymore
That's why I tell you that I love you
Does it even matter what we leave behind?
I'm flying on an airplane over the grand canyon,
Imagining the strangers going through the wreckage of this flight if it were to crash
And would anyone notice or care, gathering up my stuff from the desert below?
Would they investigate the last song that I was listening to?
Would they go through my phone and see the last picture I ever took was of our sleeping daughter early this morning,
Getting ready to go and I was struck by her face, sweet in the blue light of our dim room
Would they follow the thread back and find her there?
I snapped back out of this plane crash fantasy still alive
And I know that's not how it would go, I know the actual mess that death leaves behind
It just gets bulldozed in a panic by the living, pushed over the waterfall
Because that's me now, holding all your things, resisting the inevitable
Flooding of the archives, the scraps distributed by wind
A life's work just left out in the rain
But I'm doing what I can to reassemble a poor substitute version of you,
Made of the fragments and drawings that you left behind
I go though your diaries and notebooks at night
I'm still cradling you in me
There's another Nikolai Astrup painting from 1920, called "Foxgloves" that hangs on the fridge
And I look at it every morning and every night before bed
Some trees have been cut down next to a stream flowing through a birch grove in late spring
And two girls that look like you gather berries in baskets hunched over like young animals, grazing
With their red dresses against the white birch tree trunks, interweaving
Beneath the clattering leaves, the three stumps in the foreground remind me that everything is fleeting
As if reminding's what I need
But then the foxgloves grow, and I read that the first flowers that return to disturbed ground,
Like where logging took place, or where someone like me rolled around wailing in a clearing
Now I don't wonder anymore,
If it's significant that all these foxgloves spring up on the place where I'm about to build our house,
And go to live and let you fade in the night air
Surviving with what dust is left of you here
Now you will recede into the paintings
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
Tintin in Tibet
Distortion
Now Only
Earth
Two Paintings By Nikolai Astrup
Crow, pt. 2
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
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"
Earth
I don't want to live with this feeling any longer than I have to
But also, I don't want you to be gone
So I talk about you all the time, including the last day that you were alive
And I hang your pictures around the house
For me to surprise myself with and cry
Everybody that used to know us seems concerned
But if they knew that when you went through my mind
I'm full of the love that illuminated our house for all those years
And made this dancing child who tears through the days
With a brilliance you would have deepened and sang along with
But you're sleeping out in the yard now
What am I saying?
No one is sleeping
You don't even have a dead body anymore, it was taken away
I went and wrote a check and got a cardboard box full of your ashes
And a little plastic bag with your necklace
And I drove back home, truly alone
I guess I didn't bury you deeply enough
When I poured out your ashes beneath the three witch hazels
That you planted in the yard a few years ago in a triangle for us
Where me and the kid were rolling in the grass the other day
And I saw actual chunks of your bones
Bleached and weathered, unerasable
You're still out there in the spring upheaving
Coming out of the ground into air
Is that exact fragment, your finger that once caressed me not that long ago?
I still can feel it
And is that other shard a piece of your skull that once contained the wild brain that used to overflow with loving?
Undiscovered and gone
And now just shrapnel remains
Earth
Another place I poured your ashes out was on a chair on top of a mountain pointed at the sunset
I went back there last week after a year has passed and noticed that the chunks of your bones that haven't been blown away
Are indistinguishable from the other pieces of animal bones brought there by coyotes, vultures, and gods
Against my will I felt a little bit of solace creeping in
While I laid there on the moss
Compost and memories
There's nothing else
I can hear Wolves in the Throne Room singing
"I will lay down my bones among the rocks and roots"
At night I sit and picture myself curled up beneath
Ten feet of water at the bottom of the lake
I imagine trout bumping against me in the low, diminished light
Holding my breath, trying to be a boulder
Eroding, to join you in re-mingling with the background
Of churned muck coalescing in the dark
But to get ground down to matter only
Eternal and dumb
Becoming not a thing
Abdicating form
Two Paintings By Nikolai Astrup
I know no one now
Now I say "you"
Now after the ground has opened up
Now after you died
I wonder what could beacon me forward into the rest of life
I can glimpse occasional moments
Gleaming like bonfires burning from across the fjord
In a painting from around 1915 called "Midsummer Eve Bonfire" by Nikolai Astrup
That shines on my computer screen in 2017 in the awful July night
The house is finally quiet and still with the child asleep upstairs
So I sit and notice the painting of bonfires on the hillside and hanging smoke
In the valleys, wrapping back up through the fjords at dusk, hovering like scarves of mist draped along the ridges
Above couples dancing in the green twilight around fires
And in the water below, the reflections of other fires from other parties illuminate the depths and glitter
Shining and alone
Everyone is laughing and there's music and a man climbs up the hill pulling a juniper bow
To throw into the fire to make some sparks rise up to join the stars
These people in the painting believed in magic and earth
And they all knew loss, and they all came to the fire
I saw myself in this one young woman in the foreground with a look of desolation
And a body that looked pregnant as she leaned against the moss covered rocks off to the side
Apart from all the people celebrating midsummer
I knew her person was gone, just like me
And just like me, she looked across at the fires from far away and wanted something in their light to say:
"Live your life and if you don't the ground is definitely ready at any moment to open up again,
To swallow you back in, to digest you back into something useful for somebody"
And meanwhile above all these Norwegians dancing in the twilight
The permanent white snow gleamed
You used to call me "Neige Éternelle"
The man who painted this girl's big black eyes, gazing, drawing the fire into herself, standing alone
Nikolai Astrup, he also died young, at 47, right after finishing building his studio at home
Where he probably intended to keep on painting his resonant life into old age
But sometimes people get killed before they get to finish all the things they were going to do
That's why I'm not waiting around anymore
That's why I tell you that I love you
Does it even matter what we leave behind?
I'm flying on an airplane over the grand canyon,
Imagining the strangers going through the wreckage of this flight if it were to crash
And would anyone notice or care, gathering up my stuff from the desert below?
Would they investigate the last song that I was listening to?
Would they go through my phone and see the last picture I ever took was of our sleeping daughter early this morning,
Getting ready to go and I was struck by her face, sweet in the blue light of our dim room
Would they follow the thread back and find her there?
I snapped back out of this plane crash fantasy still alive
And I know that's not how it would go, I know the actual mess that death leaves behind
It just gets bulldozed in a panic by the living, pushed over the waterfall
Because that's me now, holding all your things, resisting the inevitable
Flooding of the archives, the scraps distributed by wind
A life's work just left out in the rain
But I'm doing what I can to reassemble a poor substitute version of you,
Made of the fragments and drawings that you left behind
I go though your diaries and notebooks at night
I'm still cradling you in me
There's another Nikolai Astrup painting from 1920, called "Foxgloves" that hangs on the fridge
And I look at it every morning and every night before bed
Some trees have been cut down next to a stream flowing through a birch grove in late spring
And two girls that look like you gather berries in baskets hunched over like young animals, grazing
With their red dresses against the white birch tree trunks, interweaving
Beneath the clattering leaves, the three stumps in the foreground remind me that everything is fleeting
As if reminding's what I need
But then the foxgloves grow, and I read that the first flowers that return to disturbed ground,
Like where logging took place, or where someone like me rolled around wailing in a clearing
Now I don't wonder anymore,
If it's significant that all these foxgloves spring up on the place where I'm about to build our house,
And go to live and let you fade in the night air
Surviving with what dust is left of you here
Now you will recede into the paintings
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