TWO PAINTINGS BY NIKOLAI ASTRUP

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 fjord at dusk,
hovering like scarves 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
illuminates the depths and glitters
shining and alone.
Everyone is dancing 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.
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 herself, standing alone,
Nikolai Astrup, he also died young, at forty seven,
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.
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,
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 the 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 two stumps in the foreground remind me that everything is fleeting.
(As if reminding is what I need.)
But then the foxgloves grow.
I read they’re 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 and let you fade in the night air,
surviving with what dust is left of you here.
Now you will recede into the paintings.