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 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 "**** 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 ******

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