Two Paintings by Nikolai Astrup

I know no one now
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 Now I say "you"
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 Now after the ground has opened up
 Now after you died
 I wonder what could beacon me forward into the rest of life
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 I can glimpse occasional moments
 Gleaming like bonfires burning from across the fjord
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 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
 Offering like scars of mist draped along the ridges
 Of 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 is music
 And a man climbs up the hill pulling
 a juniper down 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 of a rock soft 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 the 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 ourselves 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
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 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 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 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?
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 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
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 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 brow in late spring
 And two girls that look like you gather berries and baskets
 Hunched over like young animals, grazing
 With their red dressed against the
 white birch three trunks interweaving
 Beneath the cluttering leaves
 The three stumps in the foreground
 remind me that everything is fleeting
 As if reminding is 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 in, let you fade in the night air
 Surviving with what dust is left of you here
 Now you will recede into the paintings