Soria Moria [Live]

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