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

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 innumerable 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