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, cedared 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
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 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
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 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 away"
 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