Lyrics Soria Moria - Mount Eerie

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,
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