Well. I'm leaving Norway. And I feel a little bit of everything: wild hope for whatever comes next, eager anticipation for home, muddled regret at leaving this place where I've been for the past year and a half. Tromsø has been good to me. As I leave I hold that goodness in my head, coupled with another fact: it's time to go.

There's a quote from 'Walden' (if I haven't quoted 'Walden' enough in this blog): "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one." Right now Norway feels like a life I have lived out, and although there is more to this country--I haven't nearly plumbed its depths--it doesn't feel like there's more here for me right now. That's partly because what's here for me is the university, and I feel more than ready to put the strange cloister of universities behind me. And that's partly because--well. Sometimes the time comes to make a decision, and right now my decision is America and uncertainty, because I want to see what I find there. Between Norway and Canada, I've been gone for some time. 

I might have more to say, about what this place has given me, about what this place is. About the things I'm leaving and the things I'll miss. At the moment, though, it's hard to see much beyond the transition. I wonder, vaguely, about reverse culture shock. I look forward to seeing family and old friends. But over my last few weeks I've stood in these mountains, or down by the sea, and felt something pure and clear that I can only call love for this place. And now I'm leaving it behind indefinitely for somewhere familiar that feels a little bit foreign, and although I'm looking forward I can't help but pause at the gate to look back. So I'll say it: Tromsø, I'll miss you. And whatever the future holds, I hope my experiences here can be a moveable feast; at the very least, I am certain I will carry them with me into the future, although I'm uncertain what guise they'll take. 

North

Look North more often.
Go against the wind,
you'll get ruddy cheeks.
Find the rough path. Keep to it.
It's shorter. North is best.

Winter's flaming sky -
summer night's sun miracle.
Go against the wind. Climb mountains.
Look north. More often.

This land is long.
Most is north.

Road's End

The roads have come to their end now,
they don't go any further, they turn here,
over on the earth there.
You can't go any further if you don't want
to go to the moon or the planets. Stop now
in time and turn to a wasp's nest or a cow track,
a volcano opening or a clatter of stones in the woods--
it's all the same. Something else.

They won't go any further as I've said
without changing, the engine to horseshoes,
the gear shift to a fir branch
--which you hold loose in your hand
--what the hell is this?

-Rolf Jacobsen

To the Harbormaster

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

-Frank O'Hara, 1957

A Map of the Western Part of the County of Essex in England

Something forgotten for twenty years: though my fathers
and mothers came from Cordova and Vitepsk and Caernarvon,
and though I am a citizen of the United States and less a
stranger here than anywhere else, perhaps,
I am Essex-born:
Cranbrook Wash called me into its dark tunnel,
the little streams of Valentines heard my resolves,
Roding held my head above water when I thought it was
drowning me; in Hainault only a haze of thin trees
stood between the red doubledecker buses and the boar-hunt,
the spirit of merciful Phillipa glimmered there.
Pergo Park knew me, and Clavering, and Havering-atte-Bower,
Stanford Rivers lost me in osier beds, Stapleford Abbots
sent me safe home on the dark road after Simeon-quiet evensong,
Wanstead drew me over and over into its basic poetry,
in its serpentine lake I saw bass-viols among the golden dead leaves,
through its trees the ghost of a great house. In
Ilford High Road I saw the multitudes passing pale under the
light of flaring sundown, seven kings
in somber starry robes gathered at Seven Kings
the place of law
where my birth and marriage are recorded
and the death of my father. Woodford Wells
where an old house was called The Naked Beauty (a white
statue forlorn in its garden)
saw the meeting and parting of two sisters,
(forgotten? and further away
the hill before Thaxted? where peace befell us? not once
but many times?).
All the Ivans dreaming of their villages
all the Marias dreaming of their walled cities,
picking up fragments of New World slowly,
not knowing how to put them together nor how to join
image with image, now I know how it was with you, an old map
made long before I was born shows ancient
rights of way where I walked when I was ten burning with desire
for the world's great splendors, a child who traced voyages
indelibly all over the atlas, who now in a far country
remembers the first river, the first
field, bricks and lumber dumped in it ready for building,
that new smell, and remembers
the walls of the garden, the first light.

-Denise Levertov, 1958

I was back in Lista last week, visiting the small, quiet place where my maternal grandmother came from. I stayed in her childhood home, a staunch house made of listing boards which purportedly dates to 1816. I spent my days walking along the coast, riding the old 3-speed bike from the barn out on the thin roads that thread through pastures, swimming in the bracing water, eating long meals in the tiny yard while Norwegian conversations ebbed around me.

My relationship with my Norwegian relatives is haphazard at best, stymied by the fact that my Norwegian remains poor. Lista--or Borhaug, or Vågsvoll, if we want to pin the location precisely--is not my home, of course. I'm not from there. I remember sitting on the front steps of the old house last summer and wondering what it would be like if I were from that small place in the shadow of the Lista lighthouse; it would be different, surely, and I would be different. So, no, it's not where I'm from. But it's as close as I get in Norway, and even as I fall out of step with these Norwegian conversations, I'll occasionally skim from them a story about my grandparents, and inside the house their are photographs of my grandparents, my parents, myself. So if the house is not home, it is not unfamiliar, either. Lista is similar: it is, after all, a place I've been before--last summer, last spring, ten years ago, twenty-four years ago. I know the roads in a loose way, enough not to feel lost. And I have family here who will embrace me, even if I am definitively American and a little at odds; because there is no question about the fact that I am family. And maybe that's part of why Lista feels a little bit magic: I am not from Norway, but I'm tied to this particular part of Norway, to this place. The cords have been frayed by time and salt, but they're there, tenuous but real.

While we were sitting in the tiny yard that's wedged in between the house and the road, eating rice pudding and drinking coffee, one of my mother's cousins told me, first in Norwegian and then in English, that Tante Sine--my grandmother--used to say that it's the same sun, same moon, over Lista and the U.S.A. And I suppose she was right. But as I watched the full moon rounded itself out over Lista, I wasn't sure how much it mattered. I was happy to be where I was.

Sure On This Shining Night

Sure on this shining night
Of star made shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.
The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wand'ring far
alone
Of shadows on the stars.

-James Agee, 1934

Somnambulist Ballad

Green, how I need you now, green.
Green the breeze. The branches green.
The small boat far on the sea.
The pony on the high sierra.
With shadows on her waistband
She dreams on a veranda,
Green her skin and her hair green
With eyes of icy silver.
Green, how I need you now, green.
Under the gypsy moon,
She is observed by things there,
Things she cannot see.

Green, how I need you now, green.
Gigantic stars of hoarfrost
Come with the fish of shadows
That opens the high road of dawn.
The fig tree scrapes the breeze
With sandpaper of its branches.
The mountain, a filching cat,
Bristles its acrid spikes.
But who's coming? And where from?
She's dreaming on her veranda,
Green her skin and her hair green,
She dreams of the bitter sea.

Good friend, I want to barter
This horse of mine for your house,
My saddle for your mirror,
My dagger for your quilt.
Good friend, I have come bleeding
From the passes of Cabra.
"Had I the might, my boy,
We would strike up this bargain.
But I am no longer I
Nor is my house my own house."
Good friend, I want to die
Decently in my own bed--
If it might be, made of steel,
And the linens of fine holland.
Can't you see the wound I've taken
From my breastbone to my throat?
"On your white shirt you wear
Three hundred swarthy roses.
Your blood is oozing, pungent,
On all sides of your sash.
But I am no longer I
Nor is my house my own house."
Let me at least, then, climb
Up to the high verandas;
Let me climb, then, let me climb
Up to the green verandas;
Balustrades of the moon
Where the water's voice resounds.

Now the two friends are climbing
Up to the high verandas
Leaving a trail of blood,
Leaving a trail of tears.
Tiny lanterns of tin
Were trembling on the rooftops.
A thousand tambourines,
All crystal, lacerate the dawn.

Green, how I need you now, green.
Green the breeze. The branches green.
The two friends have gone up.
A long wind was leaving
A rare taste on the tongue
Of gall, mint and sweet basil.
Good friend, where is she, tell me
Where is your bitter daughter?
"She waited, how often, for you,
How often she would be waiting,
Fresh her face and her hair black,
Here on this green veranda."

Over the face of the cistern
There the gypsy girl wavered,
Green her skin and her hair green,
With eyes of icy silver.
An icicle of the moon
Suspended over the water.
The night turned intimate
As a little village plaza.
Drunken civil guards
Were pounding down the door.
Green, how I need you now, green.
Green the breeze. The branches green.
The small boat far on the sea.
The pony on the high sierra.

-Federico Garcí Lorca