Two Paintings By Nikolai Astrup Lyrics - 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 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 

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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." 

Photos 

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 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