Mount Eerie - Two Paintings by Nikolai Astrup lyrics

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 on 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's 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-covered
Rocks 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 the 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 snap 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
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 through 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 grove in late spring
And two girls that look like
You gather berries in baskets
Hunched over like young animals
Grazing with their red dresses
Against the white birch
Tree 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

Well, 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