Two Paintings by Nikolai Astrup - Mount Eerie

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 ninth

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 scars 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 is music

And a man climbs up the hill pulling a juniper bough 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 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 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

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?

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 brow in late spring

And two girls that look like you gather berries and baskets

Hunched over like young animals, grazing

With their red dresses against the white birch three trunks interweaving

Beneath the clattering 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