Soria Moria - Mount Eerie

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,

cedar driftwood 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 while 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 live 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