Song information On this page you can find the lyrics of the song Two Paintings by Nikolai Astrup, artist - Mount Eerie. Album song Now Only, in the genre Инди
Date of issue: 15.03.2018
Record label: P.W. Elverum & Sun
Song language: English
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 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 is 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 of a rock 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 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 dresses against the white birch three 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 |
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 |