loðrétt

I have a black pot of white tea. The room still smells, faintly, of ginger, from a bout of morning baking. The sky is white, the hill green and black except where yellow bamboo cuts upward from the fenceline. Without meaning to echo it, I have lined up tapers on the sill, all of them yellow too.

Just now I realize that the warm shape sometimes seen in the shadow of the trees past the bamboo is none of the things I have theorized it might be (a piece of metal flashing, a wayward bit of plastic), but the window of another house, lit from within. Someone is on the other side of the pane, no doubt enjoying being in a warm yellow dry space instead of among the wet trees. I know I am glad to be on this side of the pane through which I peer out at that one.

In between, rain sheets down, mostly invisible.

eldur og gler

A book tells me that the reflection of the fire in the dark glass of the windows, seen more faintly and as if it were outside, leaping eeriely in time with the fire in the hearth, was once called witch-fire by some. It strikes me as a good name, but I am not fearful of witches. It was probably an unnerving name to those who used it. The book too suggests that people did not like to see it, that they covered the windows against the dark, the cold, and also the illusion of mysterious burning on the snow around the house.

I have no hearth, but I have lit candles. I do not draw the curtains because I do not mind the phantom flames in the window. They are merry enough. They hover, forming new constellations with the usual flock of glittering points, some outside lights on the hill, some reflections of lights of the room.

Ah, now they are guttering.

nýströnd

An island in the sound in someone else's North, not my own. An unfamiliar but pleasing strand, littered with white and purple shells and strewn with weed like black magnetic tape, cluttered with drifted timber from the forests of pine and fir. The stones are black and green and some quartz-translucent, grown green with algae and mosses. Some of them, I am nearly sure, are basalt shot with crystal, the old, cold sputterings of nearby volcanoes. Others are like the blue-green rock of Austurlandið.

I am on the edge of the world, or of my world. Other people's worlds must extend past here to the West, but so far mine does not.

And it is St. Stephen's Day. I have seen no wren, living nor dead, but an eagle, white-headed, flew along the water as I watched from the shore.

1133 - 1193

Deus qui hodiernam diem sacratissimam nobis in beati thorlaci confessoris tui atque pontificis solempnitate tribuisti. adesto propicius ecclesie tue precibus; ut cuius gloriatur meritis muniatur suffragijs.

Og góði guð, bjarga oss frá skötunni.

wc

This café used to be a semi-regular hangout, but my patterns of moving through the day have changed, and it has changed owners several times. It is no longer familiar.

And an unfamiliar café w.c. can be disconcerting. This one now features a roll of toilet paper chained and padlocked to a metal rail as if it were a junkyard dog or an escape risk. The paper is faintly damp, the result, I assure myself, of ambient humidity (it is raining outside), but this fact causes me to reflect upon how distressing almost any moisture is when encountered in a public toilet. Unless actively flowing from the tap, it is universally unwelcome: on the floor, on the countertop, standing in the sink, dripping from the door handle, to say nothing of more fraught places. We will go to great lengths to avoid coming in contact with it, and the set of problems that attends this desire is exactly what toilet paper is intended to help you with.

But as a helpfully-located grafitto reminds me:

Who needs toilet paper when you have fingers?

A later hand offers the imprecation:

eco-weenie Mac user

which takes me a moment to parse. Another wit has rejoined with:

Who needs fingers when you have a tongue?

On the facing wall, I am greeted by twelve lines of holocaust denial in rhyming couplets, of which the first line reads: ho ho ho ho holocaust. It has been heavily annotated in imagined margins in numerous later hands, the owners of which take exception to the poet's spelling, grammar, and claims of fact both specific and general.

I opt to flush by pushing the lever down with one heavily booted foot. Doing this is not unsatisfying.

late

Striding purposefully stationward and past a telephone pole, a homemade poster catches her eye. She is in a hurry. Her eye skips over it, catching only the first line and part of the last: FOUND DOG and then If this was your dog ...

snowfall

She dreams of winter woods, an icy pond, a remembered house, a pregnant friend. She sees a fox off through the trees. Its body is black, but its head is red. Then it is on the road. It has become a monster, like a child's drawing of a wolf. It menaces them.

When she wakes, she stands before the mirror and runs a finger over one eyebrow. The gray hair that had sprouted weeks ago among the black is gone.

níu vikna

Little black animal, radio-array ears sitting too large on either side of her big-eyed head, upper body still all a-fuzz with kitteny down, lower legs and feet getting the gloss and sleekness of guard hairs: she doesn't quite match. Running, her hind feet seem all but about to overtake her forefeet, apt to send her bouncing off the chairlegs like a rubberband in an animated short. Walking, she steps with a mix of care and glee, jerky like a kid in rubber boots and pajamas, let out to splash in the puddles of a wet morning after a stormy night. Everything must be glistening for her, breaking the light in zany ways, trailing motes and stars.

No wonder she flops down and slides so readily into fur-smelling sleep. But even then, the claws push out of their slots and draw back in, little muscles along her boney spine twitch and strain. I can see down between the hairs to the purplish skin of her temples, but no farther in, and I have to confess mystification: what could such a tiny brain only nine weeks old be dreaming?

jólnir

"So it has to be a verbal root. The question is what that root means."

Indeed. I stand corrected on the etymology of Yule, and the correction rings true like a silver handbell. After singing In dulce jubilo and Gaudete and enjoying wassails and sword dancers and a procession bearing the boar's head, after snaking in a dance out into the hall, I feel sure that I have done whatever it is that resides in that lost verb, and I am hungry for the kind of midwinter fare I have myself prepared in dark and snowy places: pears and blue cheese, lamb and potatoes, carrots.

sætindi

Passing a sidewalk cart selling churros (snakey, ribbed, fried), I find myself sniffing the air in expectation of the smell of roasted, sugared nuts. It is a Copenhagen holiday smell and a Reykjavík-aspiring-to-Copenhagenhood holiday smell. I once encountered a cloud of it while exiting Kringlan on Þorláksmessa, discovered that the mall had stationed there a girl with a cart selling varme nødder. I exclaimed, as did my companion, and we exclaimed again when the girl responded in unmistakable københavnsk. We were very impressed with the commitment to authenticity: not merely roasted nuts but an actual Danish girl to sell them to you. Perhaps it was merely Kringlan aspiring to be Strøget, but my companion bought a little paper cone of them and munched happily as we treaded across the car park with our last-minute purchases.

I miss that roasted nut smell here, though there are plenty of other holiday smells and sweet things to consume. A frenzy of baking has fallen upon me, and I have been dealing yoghurt cake and oatmeal cookies, cupcakes and muffins with both hands. Earlier today I felt the urge to boil sugar and make tray upon tray of pralines, blobs of southern decadence lumpy with pecans. This evening I realize that I have only ever made pralines with súrmjólk, and I cannot find súrmjólk here.

monocerus

Fascinating.

Scientists have finally discovered what the narwhal uses that spiralling tusk for. As if this animal were not wondrous enough, livid in color (ná-hvalur, the corpse whale), threader of arctic seas, now it seems that the long jutting tooth is not a jousting lance but a delicate probe. The narwhal has turned what makes those of us with oversensitive teeth wince upon sipping ice water or hot soup into an adaptation. The great tooth affords more than that apparently, more that mere temperature readings:

10 million nerve endings tunnel from the tusk's core toward its outer surface, communicating with the outside world. The scientists say the nerves can detect subtle changes of temperature, pressure, particle gradients and probably much else, giving the animal unique insights.

The mind races with the possibilities. What do the náhvalir know about the northern seas that we do not? They must know plenty that we know already: that the Sellafield plant periodically leaks radioactive waste, that PCBs leach upward in the food chain, that a whole þula's worth of persistent organic pollutants (lindane, chlordane, toxaphene, hexachlorocyclohexane) threaten the great silver- and white-pelted creatures of the glittering kingdom.

In the middle ages and long afterwards, narwhal tusks were traded south as unicorn horns, priceless objects. They were built into the thrones of Danish kings, eager to show their dominion over the cold wealth of Greenland. They were made into drinking vessels for monarchs wary of poisoners, for a property of unicorn horn was to render all poisons harmless.

I find myself wishing that the tusks had this miraculous property after all, and that they had it in situ, still anchored in their sockets, slicing prowlike through the icy waters, trailing glassy bubbles and purity.

sjónleikar

Last night's performance had an intermission.


Act 1

A ballroom or social hall. Dancing. Have I forgotten to mention to my partner that I do not know how to dance per se, that I merely do my best to slide around in an appropriately rhythmic fashion? No matter. He seems game, though I think we might be tangoing to something not a tango, or else doing something other than a tango to a tango beat.


Act 2

Racing in slow motion for the airport. I really must get this later flight; I have already missed the earlier one, the one I originally booked. And I don't have everything I need, and I'm not sure why.

geist

Laphroaig
Laphroaig
Lagavulin
Lagavulin
Lagavulin

Walking up the hill, she pauses, lies down in the dew, stares heavy-lidded up at the stars. Clearly visible are the Pleiades, Taurus, and Orion the Hunter. Invisible is the black nebula shaped like a horse head, but she knows it is out there.

Eager for sleep, she gets to her feet again, trudges the rest of the hill homeward. There she climbs into bed, tips into sleep, dreams of horses, but white ones, some spectral and some chalky.

hvert

Up and up and up. A walk in the dark, uphill, a climb in a winter night barely chill enough to recall summer night elsewhere. If it were only a touch more brisk she might imagine she were far to the North, in August, but even then it would be lighter, wouldn't it? There would be that suspect glow at the southern horizon even if the Aurora were still flaring green in the northern sky. Still, she is oddly disoriented.

There isn't much light on these hilly streets. The sidewalk is narrow. Tendrils of the ivy on the fence slap and claw against her jacket as she passes. She feels them but cannot see them. The moon is shining through a scrap of cloud and making it shimmer like rhyolite. Off in the trees, something more than wind is moving about, but she cannot see it at all.

Up and up and up, knowing that coming back down will make her knee ache.

kitsj

It's really almost too tasteful to be called kitsch, but I expect that the little Danish cut-paper heart with the wee cut-paper evergreen sprig counts, hanging on a gold thread from a nail. In any case it is overpowered by the rest of the decor, little of it seasonal.

þrjár könnur

I was about to make myself some tea when I realized I was unsure which pot to use. The black one would undoubtedly impart a solid, earthy flavor, and that could be just the thing before putting shoulder to the wheel. But then again the red pot would probably brew up a bright-tasting cup, good for keemun and for feeling ready to wage war on the projects of the day. On the other hand, the white pot might suit a delicate silver-tip or an unrolled leaf, a more refined and patrician taste suited to surveying the yet-undone tasks with regal detachment, waving imperiously in their general direction with the unoccupied, right hand, and declaring that they will be accomplished in due course.



















Where is Georges Dumézil? I am sure there will be enough for two.

boxer, boxer, schnauzer

Through the glass wall of the café I see the car pull up. It is bubble-like and silver, one of the redesigned Volkswagens. A young woman is driving. A gray-haired man is in the passenger seat. She parts, they get out, get themselves coffee in paper cups, cross back over the street to sit on the bench in the sunlight. I can see them past the parked car.

The car sits on my side of the street, all cool silvers, technical-looking blues, and graphite blacks. The windows are rolled all the way down. Through these eye-shaped apertures, three dogs, also all black and white and gray, have thrust out their curious, whiskery heads to sniff and stare in three different directions.

við hina tjörn

mergansers
grebes
egrets
gulls
ducks
herons
cormorants, black, in the hundreds, sitting upright on the semicircle of bobbing white floats

fuglaskoðun

Driving over the bridge, there are geese in the distance and cranes up close. The geese are high, high up. They are flapping south, jostling with each other for the prime spots in the flock's slipstream. They are so high up that their bodies are invisible; only the wings can be seen.

The cranes are not so high, though they are way up there, standing very tall indeed beside the bridge. They stretch up from the water, balancing like stilt-walkers in a line, firey red in the afternoon light. They do not move at all. Their cabs are empty. It is Saturday, and their operators are having their weekends.

næsti

Last year:

Tivoli
æbleskiver
vetur
traffic flickering all the way down Hringbraut


This year:

flute music
yoghurt cake
rain
surprisingly many trees turned brilliantly red

flash

Pouring rain, early afternoon, all the electric lights flicker and then come back up. Out the window something flares, a pink fireball in the grayness. I get out of my chair. I am hoping to see it better, but it is gone before I am fully standing, and I cannot tell just where it had been, never mind what.

Two minutes later, sirens are audible, south and west.

Five minutes later, the fire engine rolls up the hill, past the front of the building.

Hours later, I still have no idea what happened.

hallærislegt

Reading a line in Óláfs saga helga K. 106 my eye skips, and for a moment I think Snorri has written about an early eleventh-century famine of squirrels. I am wrong, of course. It is merely an everyday grain shortage, but the idea sticks in my mind.

A famine of squirrels. I suppose that would entail a severe shortage of the animals. Such a thing might have occurred in early medieval Europe, the result of overhunting to support the trade in prized squirrel pelts, though as I recall the reverse was in fact the problem: squirrels were so plentiful in the forests of Russia that supply overwhelmed even the demands of fashion. The bottom dropped out the the squirrel pelt market and has yet to recover.

A famine of squirrels would not mean that squirrels themselves were experiencing famine. That would have required me to hallucinate a different grammatical construction. I consider this the next day on my way to a café, rounding the corner of a building where a fluff-tailed rodent of unlikley rotundity is trying his clumsy best to gain the top of a low ledge where someone has set out sunflower seeds.

advent

Winter is here! I overheard someone say yesterday. Rain is here, certainly, and cooler air, but I have not seen winter. He is taller, thinner, as I recall, and he wears a hat. At least he used to. It has been a little while since I saw him last.

reentry

The answering machine blinks one red eye from across the room. I regard it with dread disguised as skepticism. I am boiling water for tea. Do not speak to me of my e-mail queue.

uncle

Midmorning I stepped over the rumpled and empty-seeming carcass of a rat. It was lying among some red leaves on the sidewalk, flashing its white belly upward in an ultimate gesture of submission to the universe.

flöskur

It is possible that the place I dream in is somewhere close to Finland, if not geographically, then in some other way that I have yet to work out.

This dream took place near a sandy shore, bright with northern summer light. It was not Helsinki and it was not an undiscovered island in Breiðafjörður, but it reminded me of both those places. There was a festival of some kind. There was a vast snaking procession that went up and down the broad flights of white stone steps that led, everywhere, up to neo-classical buildings. The snaking line was the dragon, the festival embodiment of a dragon, though I do not remember anyone carrying a head out in front. Perhaps the man in front was the head, somehow.

A woman was chosen, I think from the people assembled in the Aula, to be married, ritually, to the dragon. That was to be the climax of the festivities. The rest would be eating and drinking, most likely, and the enjoyment of the long, mild, summer day that would not grow dim until sometime near midnight. I was not the one chosen, but I had not expected to be.

There was a bottle, gold-colored glass with a black paper label, white lettering saying something in Danish. It was full of memory, but otherwise empty, and the cap had long since gone missing. It had never belonged to me, but I remembered it belonging to someone else. There had been laughter. The sight of the bottle brought it back to me, or halfway back. Not really all the way back. Not close enough to grasp.

At some point there had been another bottle, and it had been mine. I remembered this now and realized that I had forgotten years ago that it had even existed. The object itself was gone. It might have been blue.

trekkja

I have two bottles of vodka here. One is packed nearly full of cranberries. Full, that is, except for where the vodka is, and the vodka fills the rest of it. The other is not so full of cranberries. They float at the top, and in the space below hang several curling orange rinds like long fish beneath winter ice. A sprig of thyme pokes out from between the berries and extends down into the clear space beneath. It is less clear every day as the orange of the rinds colors the vodka and gives it a warm tinge.

All of this is set to steep for the week.

The steeping verb in Icelandic is trekkja. It is a drawing word, a pulling word, and just the same as Norwegian trekke it is used for drawing a card from the deck or a watch out of your pocket and for when the air is being pulled through the room in an uncomfortable fashion (these are cold countries) by a draught. It refers too, it would seem, to the drawing out of flavor, of aromatic oils, through the action of hot water or hard spirits.

All the same I have opened my most recently published edition of the Icelandic dictionary and consulted the entry for trekkja. There is no mention of tea, though I know that Icelanders use this verb if they are steeping tea and must for some reason talk about what they are doing. The entry mentions only coffee, the brewing thereof, and most especially the practice of pouring newly-brewed coffee back through the filter for a maximally strong drink koffínslega séð. Perhaps tea consumption was not deemed sufficiently Icelandic to warrant inclusion.

ber

On the right is firethorn. On the left, I believe, cotoneaster.

I had thought it might be bittersweet, but I was wrong. That is just as well, I think. Bittersweet and firethorn sound like the names of a pair of twins, heroines of some regretable fantasy novel. Nothing against a good fantasy novel, mind you, but my thoughts of heroism are elsewhere today.

rómi blíðum

Fjallkonan fagra
fylgist með
gengi máls mörlanda;
Fegin og fagnandi
færum nú þökk
Jónasi jöfri skáldanna

Æ, smá leirburður sakar vel ekki í tilefni dagsins.

räven och ulven

Apropos yesterday's view, I am reminded of a story.

It is from Sweden.

The fox and the wolf are travelling together. They have a long way to go, and they will be walking all night. They are tired and hungry and have just about run out of conversation by the second half of the night, and the fox says, I have an idea. Let's agree that whichever of us sees the light of the rising sun first has to catch breakfast for the both of us. The wolf looks down at the fox and thinks for a moment, and then he says Sure. And the wolf sits down facing east to wait for sunrise. The fox sits down next to him, facing west. The wolf thinks to himself that the fox is very stupid, but he doesn't say anything. He knows he's sure to win the bet.

They sit and they wait, and they wait and they sit. And the pre-dawn wind picks up and blows in the wolf's face and picks up the fur on the backs of the fox's ears. The eastern sky starts to change color, and the wolf leans forward, waiting for the disk of the sun to come over the horizon. He knows it will only be a short time now, and then he will have won this foolish bet. He is thinking about grouse and watching the horizon when the fox cries out There it is! Let's have you get us something to eat, what? The wolf whips his head around to tell the fox what an idiot he is, but before he can open his mouth, he sees what the fox saw: the first rays of the sun striking the peaks of the mountains to the west.

hittast vel á

From here you see the very last rays of the sun at sunset, the ones that fly over your head after the sun has dipped below the horizon. If you are watching westward, you will miss them entirely. They are always in the east.

If you are lucky, the moon will be rising through them.

tíu dropar

After lunch, a cup of coffee.

Not a clunky mug or (angels and ministers of grace defend us) the supersize abomination of the pint glass. The latter is, to me, ever depressing. Its proportions and the dark color of the liquid contained conjures the subliminal thought of a rich-flavored, warming stout, and the watery drip coffee that actually hits the palette suffers greatly from the unavoidable contrast. Coffee good enough and brewed strong enough to stand that comparison is not something a sane person would wish to consume by the pint. In fact, no coffee I know should ever be consumed by the pint once the prospective drinker has passed the age at which life includes things called final exams. The pint glass is in no wise an appropriate receptacle for coffee, and the serving of coffee in such containers by local cafés only provokes the desire to begin drinking well-hopped alcohol that much earlier in the day, and as none of the local cafés serves the stuff (not in pint glasses nor in any other fashion), the frustration is great --- the greater, even for being fueled by an entire pint of steaming coffee.

My after-lunch coffee was neither of these, no, and not any paper-cupped pool either, girdled with some recycled, corrugated strip stamped with advertisements for a) raves, b) wireless access, or c) web-based ventures too ill-conceived to fully penetrate my awareness. It was instead a civilized amount of coffee, 8 oz., brewed over a gas flame in an aluminum mocha pot, a poor man's espresso served in a plain, white, straight-sided German china cup. The cup's exact career is obscure, how it came to me I have forgotten if I ever knew it. But it is empty now, its slight translucence observable again, and the outlines of a few stray drops are visible on the saucer.

idée fixe

After spending a pleasant morning reading a chapter of Peter Davidson's The Idea of North, I know much more about the Aurora Borealis as seen from China and from the Mediterranean. I have an increased respect for the influence of Hergé's Tintin on the imagination of the North, and I should probably stock up on issues of Tinni when I next have the opportunity. I also know where Phillip Pullman is likely to have gotten the surname for the Texan æronaut character Lee Scoresby in his Northern Lights trilogy, and thanks to that William Scoresby (as quoted by Davidson), I understand finally what I saw from the stony beach of Seltjarnarnes when I looked across the sound towards Snæfellsnes and saw what seemed, impossibly, to be the great glacier standing like a tragic actor on cothurni and Arnestapi looming thousands of feet high.

Furthermore, I am thoroughly chilled, despite the local mild climate, and I have come in for a pot of tea.

lyn

Lightning flash, no thunder.

It makes you question your senses. It might even move you to poke a finger in one ear and twist it around awhile, trying to get the sound back on. If you had an antenna, you would bend it this way and that and grumble at the reception.

rok

There is no gable beam in this house, but if there were, I would swear that some ill vættr were riding it. The wind blew up some time last night and every hinged and shuttered thing is a-squeak. Outside, the air is rushing through pineneedles and branches, over roofs and around housecorners, doubling ever back and never tiring. It is less striking in the dark than in the day that something so great and so invisible - the air, look you - can writhe and twist so violently.

contra natura

It was recently suggested to me that I take up migrating from pole to pole, following the winter's night.

Contrary to how it might seem at first, this suggestion was meant in a joking, helpful spirit and not as an invitation to fara norður og niður. Helpful because (and I had just mentioned this) I work best after sundown. The darkness removes from my field of vision a thousand things that might draw my attention away from the little marching words that somehow, despite much prodding, still refuse to march wholly in step. A flickering candle nearby can help. The motion of the flame, when I see it, reminds me that my gaze has drifted away from my task. But having the rest of the room dim, and blackness out the window, that is far best for my writing self. So perhaps it is not so foolish, this joking idea of becoming the seasonal traveller, spending September through April in, say, Longyearbyen and May through August on Elephant Island. Assuming I could keep my ink from freezing, I would produce volumes.

But if I were to indulge in this lifestyle, what would sort of perverse being would it make me? An öfugkría? I see no such creature listed in Jón Árnason's þjóðsögur og ævintýri.

flotoyggjar

So, yes, I realize that it isn't unique, but it is nonetheless a mite startling when they float up out of the mist to the very windows of the house. It was especially foggy this morning, but I am sure I saw Svínoy and Fugloy drift by. If I'd only had the windows open, I would certainly have heard the cries of birds.

gunpowder

Remember, remember the Vifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot,
Pray tell me the reason why Gunpowder treason,
Should iver be vorgot.

Guy Fawkes Day in a part of the world that doesn't celebrate it, where Mischief Night, such as it is, it attached to another holiday and has already taken place, and where the smoky smell drifting up to my windows is not of torches, bonfires, and firecrackers set off by parading revelers but only of domestic fireplaces.

Nonetheless, some part of me would have liked to have been taking part in such festivities, chanting along and lighting firecrackers and swinging the effigy aloft for the sheer satisfaction such participation can bring. At the same time, I cannot shake the knowledge that the holiday is a traditional celebration of anti-Catholic feeling, and I have no desire to take part in that manner of thing.

What do English Catholics do on the famous fifth? The practice of Catholicism is legal now in Britain, but is the anniversary of its legalization remembered or celebrated by anyone?

Is there any of these old traditional rites that is not inherently exclusionary in some way, that does not involve unpalatable ideas about people in some way different from ourselves?

What to do with the desire to be a singing, torch-waving participant without doing anything actually incendiary?



Update: Little did I know that Guy has a blog. V would be proud, I think.

tínsla

Culled from recent dreams, the following:

Seaglass found on a pockmarked shore

Being in Brazil, among Danes

Waking and finding oneself disappointed to have been in Brazil rather than in Argentina, for one would have liked to have met Borges.

eftir á

Good heavens, is it November already? And how did my living quarters get so out of hand? It's not merely the dishes piled up in the sink and the newspapers in paper bags, no, it's worse than that. There are bits of minotaur and what might have been a sphinx all over my front room. Here, what's this tail doing here? Fancy leaving something like that around. A person could trip over it and take a header into the bookcases.

chiroptera

On the way to the train, striding past the high, dark grove of eucalyptus, I see bats overhead, darting and wheeling after the night insects.

minding your peas

An unexpected pedagogic moment arises over dinner, and I find myself called upon to explain the origins of Halloween to a nine-year-old. I say something fairly accessible about intercalation and time-reckoning but struggle a little with expressing the notion of liminal anxiety and how it might attach to a period that was neither summer nor winter. The mixing of categories might be disturbing, but how to explain that? Then it comes to me, the perfect example: it's like how on your dinner plate the peas and carrots must not be allowed to intermingle.

Ah, no, of course not, of course not! That would be terrible.

sprung

Walking through the court district, I noted three bail bond companies.

One had an unmemorable name, but used as a logo an image of Yosemite Sam holding aloft a birdcage containing Tweety. This I thought remarkable chiefly for its insistence on cuteness, not a quality I associate with either the criminal justice system in general or the situation of needing a bail bond in particular. Upon further reflection the choice of cartoon birds is very odd. Figuring the individual behind bars as a canary is dicey at best. Only an actual stoolpigeon would be worse.

Another company called itself Aladdin Bail Bonds and displayed a picture of the iconic lamp, complete with a tasteful curl of smoke emerging from the spout. It took me a few minutes to realize what was so clever about this name. It casts the accused in the role of the unwilling thief of the magic lamp. He is at once a pawn in a larger game in which all the other players are more powerful and the lucky protagonist of folktale: he has our sympathies, and he will of course prevail in the end. Even better, the lucky protagonist has the aid of a puissant donor figure---I suppose this would be the bond man. Just by getting a bond from a company with the Aladdin name, the hapless accused becomes the innocent folk hero, and the inexorable narrative logic of fable starts rolling towards miraculous escapes, riches, a fortunate match, freedom.

The third called itself Bad Boys Bail Bonds, notable up front for both alliteration and the accompanying motto: Because your mamma wants you home. The logo was an angular line drawing of a square-headed fellow busting through something, possibly a door. I was impressed with the uncompromisingness of this name. It gives nothing whatever up to The Man or to any authority figure, the Freudian Father. It posits bail bonds as something that one needs periodically in the course of normal business, perhaps in the normal course of masculinity. The accused is bad, is a boy, but even the baddest boy loves his mother, and there will be no shame in posting bail as a favor to her.

snap

The first rain of the season has hit, slowing everything down, making it gray and flannel-clad. It's long past the first night frost, of course, back in September, but that was non-event, the result of turning the refrigerator dial too far. I was rewarded the next morning with an icy pitcher of water, a pint of frozen milk, and a shocked-seeming summer squash, frozen half a centimeter deep.

óminnishegrar

Coming out of the theater, I spot a bird flapping lazily below the streetlights, and I wonder what a gull is doing in town at this hour. It alights on a parked car. Passing closer by, I see it is a heron. Two more perch nearby on a streetsign and a string of lights hanging between the trees. One is a lesser blue heron. The other two I recognize, but I cannot remember their names.

önnur saga

Hildur?

Siggi. Hello.

It's good to see you.

Likewise. Opal?

Yes, thanks. Hey, wow! They don't make these anymore.

They might be a little stale.

How ever did you get ahold of any?

I actually just found this box in my pocket. Haven't worn this coat since--

Oh, right. It's been a long time, hasn't it?

Yes, it has.

Do you ever hear from Gunni?

Not for years. I think he's seeing someone now.

Huh. We've been out of touch.

Really. That's too bad.

Yeah. Yeah. . . . That was a rough business back then.

Well, yes. We all got pretty banged up.

Scarred up, even. I mean, I've got plenty from that day in the woods.

Oh, I'm sure they suit you. And I got plenty burned myself, but nobody got killed, you know?

No, you're right. That's the important thing.

Right. You're doing all right?

Yeah, I am, yeah. You?

I'm okay.

Good, good. Hey, it was really good to see you.

Good talking to you.

Take care. And thanks for the candy. I mean, Blár Opal. Svei mér.

hreyfimyndir

The MARTA, the rapid transit in and around the city of Atlanta, has little television screens in each rail car. News and weather reports are transmitted for the entertainment and edification of the passengers. This surprised me.

Perhaps it is the influence of air travel (the pseudo-cinematic experience jammed into a jet-propelled sardine can) that makes people expect a lively screen full of talking heads to be part of their travel experience. And as air travel becomes ever more unpleasant, I am loathe to rail against any marginal comfort that might be found in such a thing.

All the same, I found it strange and ridiculous in the context of the little, rattling, local train. I understand (from the work of scholars more engaged with the birth of entertainments than I) the whole practice of resting the gaze on a framed, moving picture as one ultimately descended from the habit of gazing out the window of the traincar at the landscape moving past. Early film, after all, coincided with the rise of steam and rail travel.

But for me, the television screen set into the upper corner of the train window was a unwelcome doubling of the spectating experience. The eye was ever being caught and dragged up into that corner like an insect flown into a spider's web; the mind is almost powerless to override the hardwiring that makes bright color and shifting motion such a lure. But there was nothing in that little box full of Atlanta as performed, described, and represented by four-inch-high smiling faces near as interesting as the sight of the actual Atlanta just outside, and I was sorry to miss what I was too distracted to see.

mál draumanna

I think I was in Finland.

There was an old manor house turned museum, the upper hall filled with sleighs that had belonged to the family in past centuries. Each sleigh had name, shown on a plaque in Finnish and English, though the Finnish was not the Finnish of the waking world. A smaller one was Swan (Kalle or Kulle), a larger one Reindeer (a compound involving an element meaning ‘water’). There were more, perhaps even ten, arrayed on the white and black marble floor behind velvet ropes. All were made of bent wood, elaborate curving shapes like filligree or the arms of chandeliers.

Outside (where? I do not remember) there was a smiling young woman, perhaps a guide, with light, curly, cloudlike hair. She addressed me in Flemish (did she think I was Flemish myself?). Which I recognized as such (or as dream-Flemish) and understood enough of, but even in dreams I do not know Flemish well enough to speak it back. She must have sensed this (I hesitated, after all), and she asked, Do you understand Vlams? I wish I remembered the exact syllables well enough to try to spell them here.

I do remember drawing my eyebrows together and making my best effort, in a mix of words she’d just used and some Old Norse with reconstructed pronounciation, doing my best with the uvular R, to say that I would like to learn Vlams. Again, I cannot reproduce the syllables exactly, but they were good enough to be understood, because she brightened at this even beyond her already radiant affect and clapped me on the shoulder. She urged me to stay in touch, to visit her at home, gave me an address in Åbo.

ofan skýjum hló

Never gets old, moonrise.

The hills are east of here, so all moonrises and sunrises are late. This suits me fine.

It's just risen, full and very white, making the sodium lights on the dark hillside that much yellower. By the time I post this, it will be a hand's breadth above the trees and rooflines, up in the thin, gray clouds.

It never gets old, seeing the earth roll towards its single satellite, the same way it never fails to surprise when, just before sleep, the bed tilts away under you, and you come up gasping and clutching the covers, heart racing.

augnaráð

The idea is to make the face compelling, and the key is the eyes. The mouth allows for great flexibility, and the nose is largely optional, but the eyes, the eyes have it. By the end of the evening, there should be a whole row of staring eyes, flickering from within, arresting the viewer with the deceptively simple geometry that the brain understands as a face and therefore worthy of wary attention.

To carry out this plan intermediate steps must be taken. We bring candles out for light to work by and set knives out on the table. We saw open the gourds and slop out handfulls of sweet-smelling orange pulp. It is spongy, stringy, full of seeds. Most of it ends up in a ready bowl. Some of it lands on the ground. We become absorbed in tracing and cutting.

Through a gap in the fence pokes a little black nose, then reaches a black hand on the end of a gray-furred arm. Our refuse is someone else's happy find, though it takes us a while to notice this. But ultimately we do. We stand, peering into the darkness beyond the candlelight, just where the leaves cast shadows, transfixed by two shiny black eyes in a black mask peering back.

flew

I was moved and uplifted by Le peuple migrateur when I watched it on the largest screen of Háskólabíó. Occassionally I visit the website for the pleasure of tracing the flight patterns of particular species on the flash-animated migration map. Even though my beloved kría, the arctic tern, is mis-dubbed 'arctic gull,' this little error does not detract too much from the pleasure of reexperiencing some of the lofty, giddy awe the film inspires. I share with Perrin, the director, great admiration for the feathered tribes and their feats of travel and endurance.

Today I learn from the radio that avian influenza has reached Romania from points further east. Commentators speak of a coming pandemic, using phrases like "not if but when." The spread of the disease is being blamed, not unreasonably, on the passage of migratory birds. They come, they mingle with local domesticated flocks, and fly on.

Outside my windows I regularly see crows, jays, hawks, and hummingbirds. I enjoy the view. When my mind turns from them to cinema, I think of Perrin's souring images. I dislike the idea of seeing the flap and flutter of wings and thinking, instead, of Hitchcock.

smilodon

Construction at the University seems never-ending. Buildings going up, buildings coming down, ever a new detour or a last-minute room change. Temporary classrooms for some of the displaced students have been erected on one of the plazas. There is only just room for these wooden structures, for a spot near the middle of the plaza is already inhabited by a bronze statue of a smilodon, jaws open, one forepaw raised. The builders of the temporary classrooms clearly did their best to make the most of the space available, with the result that the outer wall passes within centimeters of the sabertooth's upraised claws and bared fangs.

The juxtaposition is a striking one. I have noticed that it yields more than one interpretation.

Over the course of any given day, as the light changes, the smilodon's affect changes. Sometimes he seems about to thrust his angry forepaw through the cheap siding in a fit of territoriality or æsthetic offense at sub-standard architecture. In twilight he looks like a moment from a horror film, the monster's final approach to the abode of men, and the next shot will be from inside, as the beast's head and shoulders come crashing through from without. In low morning light, from certain angles, he looks less angry and more inquisitive, reaching a paw out to bat at this new, strange part of his environment. Occassionally he has seemed to me to be about to scratch at the wooden siding, gently for such a big animal, in the hopes that someone inside would come out, perhaps with a bowl of milk.

quillam

At wood s lot I stumble across a link to the photography of Edward Burtynsky. There, under breaking ground and further under tailings I confront 11 stunning images of mine-related devastation. Here is one. Simultaneously, I have the new realization that some of my favorite places (Kerið, Moðruvellir, Námuskarð, Vítið, &c.) have that same beauty, with no industry in sight. The resemblance extends beyond tailings. Rauðhólar, always strange, now clearly resembles not just a stranding (skibsbrud) but shipbreaking (skibsophug).

I have to rethink the entire landscape. Thousands of birds nest there and only there; everyone knows that. But whose invisible mines leave those tailings? Who uses that island as a shipbreaking yard and for what fleet?

að hluti til

This evening's cats are partial. That is, I encountered only parts of them. I presume them to be, in fact, whole cats extending beyond the limits of my immediate perception.

The first was a slender calico tail hanging between the stone balusters of a footbridge. The attention of the presumptive cat was focussed on something off in the dark and the bushes; I did not see what.

The second was only a meow, rather plaintive, with a frequency of about once every three seconds, heard from above and slightly to the west, for a duration of perhaps a quarter of an hour.

andre ganger

Sometimes it looks like this. Sometimes the door is further away, other times closer.

stækkun

In the mornings the light glints off all the strands of the web and shines through the legs of the spider. (I have taken photographs of this effect, but I am being coy and I do not intend to show them to you.)

I write through and I mean through, not between. My neighbor hanging in the window has long, stripey, jointed legs, and the dark stripes are opaque but the light stripes are translucent. It is a sexy, sheer effect any designer of hosiery would justly envy. I have spent a fair amount of time peering outwards and admiring how the arachnid architecture lights up in the sunshine. My photographs allow me to look even more closely by magnifying the image. There is muscle in the hollow tubes the drinking-straw-like legs, thin fiber that twitches and moves the articulated mechanism. I know this to be the case, but I cannot quite see it in the photographs, even when viewed super-large on my computer screen. I just see the light coming through.

I may look again tomorrow.

vöndur

Found these and thought they might appeal.
















There was also a small white dog, prick-eared and bushy-bummed, looking smart in what could have as well been a pair of plus fours. He might have been on his way to play a round of golf, or, more likely, to have a drink in the clubhouse (proper attire required).

And I nearly forgot that little loop of some vegetative thing, twisted like a withy, a fairie-child's hoop. This morning it rolled along just ahead of me for ten strides, animated by the breeze.

paradís

I had forgotten this word:

neorxnawang

But I remembered it again today, and I am glad, because it had been one of my favorites. Imagine - this was what English-speakers had called paradise.

áttandi, tíundi

October again, and again the weird sense of displacement, the feeling that things are slightly off. It is, after all, the eighth month, number ten. The slippage in the numeric portion of the calendar points, for me, at the somber anniversaries on the march in this part of the year, at intercalary chaos in general, at some vague dread of having lost track somehow and being too late.

For some reason September never brings this feeling on. Even though it is seventh and number nine, I hear the element sept- as if it came from a Proto Indo European root meaning colored leaves, summer's end, night frost, wood smoke and had nothing with sevens to do at all. Maybe it is because I habitually confuse sevens and nines anyway, or because the smell of new books tends to soothe any worries about the coming autumn, or because no terrible ill has ever befallen me in September.

Nonetheless, I like October and always have. But it makes the needle skip, gives a little jolt, makes me want to try to race to catch up with the things that are gliding away.

nábúar

I've been getting more familiar with my neighbors.

I stepped out my door this afternoon only to realize that I was being coolly observed by a gray cat. This would be unremarkable but for the fact that my door (at least the door I mean to indicate this time with the phrase "my door") is on a upper floor of a building that does not permit the residence of animals. Keys still in hand, I regarded the cat and wondered just what his status was. A tourist, perhaps, visiting friends? Or was he an indocumentado? The cat regarded me back from his spot on the hallway carpet, not visibly put out but also not particularly friendly. Cautious. Apartment building hallways are strange spaces, after all, where the rules of social conduct can be a little hazy. I had somewhere to be, and I did not want to make awkward conversation that might have touched on my interlocutor's potentially illegal status (this would not have been neighborly), and so I made for the stairwell without tarrying (looking, I expect, like someone who had just run into a former lover in the grocery store).

The other neighbor with whom I have made a passing acquaintance is a large spider living immediately outside my living room window. The pane of intervening glass makes for an easier and thus more comfortable coexistence, though I am not sure that reflects well on me. The spider seems at any rate blissfully unconcerned about living in what amounts to a two-dimensional panopticon. I, for my part, am not anxious that my neighbor will be deported in dead of night, as the few centimeters between his abode and my own puts him outside the reach of the law.

halt

Enormous black Schäfer on the plaza, his head as long as my forearm and hand, huge triangular ears twitching fore and then aft, his tail near sweeping the ground behind him. He does not trot like Fido but glides, bent-legged, like a visiting spirit keeping a low profile in a wolf suit, a lupine lowrider. It's the gait of hip dysplasia. I question whether I ought to be appreciating its æsthetics, enjoying how deformity makes for an impressive-looking stride. He is not so unlike the long-legged nineteen-year-old now crossing the plaza, satchel over one tanned shoulder, her high shoes making her swing the flat blades of her hips to and fro so that heads turn and watch her pass.

Both of them make me think of a boy I remember whose mild scoliosis made his back a beautiful S-curve from front to back, tipping his hips and his ribcage out of the prosaic straight line most men have. It did not make him girlish, but rather powerful-looking, elastic. I drew him again and again in the margins of my algebra notes

Somewhere I read that the skeletons of Welsh bowmen had been unearthed in Britain. After years of drawing 200-pound bows with one hand, training for war since boyhood, they had built up such muscle on their right arms that it had pulled their growing spines to one side. Nature's symmetry was sacrificed for military effect, for the ability to rain death upon the French at Agincourt. Skeleton after skeleton came to light with the same swayed vertebræ, all speaking of intimate knowledge of bent yew. I wonder if, in life, these young men also had a compelling, unbalanced elegance in the way their shoulders tipped or the way they leaned in doorframes, if people admired their bent frames as a kind of beauty.

uppkast

Creativity is a strange thing and sometimes quite difficult and uncomfortable. For this reason, when engaged, say, in the production of multiple drafts of a letter one is not even terribly excited about writing, it can be theraputic to consider the vocabulary of the draft itself.

The draft (or draught) has to do with dragging or drawing, pulling and hauling, as in draft horse and as in drayage. The cognates are clear: Icelandic draga (to drag) and its derivative drög (a draft). The rough draft can be rough going indeed, and we have perhaps all felt like the overloaded equine, straining between the shafts.

But sometimes the writing isn't going even that well, and that is when I derive some measure of glee from savoring how the Scandinavian word for draft, utkast (something just kind of thrown out there, I suppose), corresponds to the more amusing Icelandic uppkast, itself morphologically identical to, f.eks., Norwegian oppkast, from kaste (throw) and opp (up), and meaning just what you think it does.

That Icelandic word uppkast so well reflects, on a bad writing day, the sensation of having retched up something terrible, a sensation I think we all know well. On those days I sense Egill and Óðinn in the background, watching, probably laughing, in fact most probably snorting small beer out their nostrils as if in ironic recapitulation of the reigning metaphor. Of course, it all resonates, too, with the myth of poetry as the vomiting forth of the skaldic mead, the oral presentation, if you will, of the well-digested materials of inspiration. And, when one is really flying, creatively speaking, this is what makes uppkast appropriate even to those better writing days as well.

ljón norðursins

I am thinking of a mountain far away, increasingly white, where snow is falling in flakes the size of a dog's paw: hundslappadrífa. I have it on good authority that this is in fact occurring and also that hundslappadrífa is sometimes called ljónslappadrífa; the paw is then that of a lion. This makes me, here, thinking of the snowy mountain there, think also of the people there under that mountain (chilly, I presume, winding their mufflers ever tighter as the wind picks up) thinking of lions.

Actual lions are as far from them as their mountain is from me, for it isn't Kilamanjaro or even Olympus I have in mind, but Esja. Seen in that light, it is strange that any kind of snow blowing down Esja's mossy flanks should be called after a lion, an animal that has never trod the heaths of Thule or Norroway.

But other signs point to a collective boreal lion dream. Think of the lion of Finland, the axe-wielding, crown-bearing lion of Norway, Scotland's royal lion, England's three lions passant, the three blue lions of Denmark surrounded by a flurry of hearts. Some great feline stalks the Northern imaginary, clearly, one prouder and less shy of daylight than the black cats of Britain. Perhaps the fall of ljónslappadrífa is his actual airy tread.

pop

Today, a list of words pertaining to weasels. They were all new to me, and I feel compelled to share.

foulmart
foumart
fitchet
fitchew (all these are names for the polecat)
fitch (pelt of same, or a brush made of the fur of same)

(Should you crave more information on the nomenclature of the polecat, a fascinating article by Duncan Brown in Mammal Review 32:2 (2002): 145-9 can be found here.)

sweetmart (the pine marten; I will ever after imagine this animal wearing cologne)

zorilla (an African relative of the weasel, one who looks more like the American skunk. I hope that someone out there is as pleased as I am to find that zorilla is a real word.)

gardínur

Did I mention the curtains? I think I mentioned the curtains.

precipice

Keep getting up and going over to the drawer. Open it. Close it. Open it. Look down into it at the brass whistle. Close it. Open it again. Look at the whistle. Touch it with your finger.

Stop touching it. Close the drawer. Walk away. Walk back. Open the drawer. Look down at the whistle. Pick it up and register its weight. Put it back. Close the drawer.

Open it again. Take out the whistle and put it to your lips, not to play it but merely to feel the metal there. Do not play the whistle. But consider that if you did, you would not hear the piping note.

briller

I had not thought that these roses were pink, but that was before I bought these curtains. I see now that I was mistaken.

steamer

It's the hottest month of the year here, but the heat is coming up, steam up through the pipes, comes up daily now, or nightly, and typically at 4.00 AM with not so much a fanfare as a drumroll. In fact it is hardly so rapid a beat. The pace is dirgelike, or else like the drumbeat for rowers of some enormous becalmed boat, slipping through the dark water on brute manpower, pulled in time with the deliberate striking of a bronze-headed drum.

Or, such are the thoughts that might occur to the half-waking mind when that mind is pulled like a flopping fish from sleep at 4.00 AM by the insistent, slow, and not least loud clank and tap of the rising steam. The radiator in the next room becomes that bronze-headed drum, or perhaps the boat itself, of iron, like in a Russian fairytale, and that boat is the conveyance of sleep on the shining surface of the night. But, perversely, despite steady rowing by the crewmen of that great ship of sleep, you are yourself uncomfortably awake, and you remain so, considering that contradiction until the metallic drumbeat softens into a foghorn, and you are in Stöðvarfjörður or Truro before you know you are dreaming.

pönnukökur

A: "Drat. They are a little leathery again. Sorry about that."

B: (chewing) "A little leathery, but delightful!"

(pause)

A & B: "Like bats!"

herjar

I hear that hawk again, and crows, and up the hillside I can see two broad-winged black shapes swooping and harrying, chasing the young raptor off. The undersides of his wings are very pale.

móttaka

Tipsy, headed down the stairwell, meeting a passel of Swedes coming up the stairwell, confused, asking half-rhetorically och på svenska: how do we get out? --and the brain offers up only some hybrid Icelando-Norwegian: beint ááá ... ahh ... fram og svo (så?) til høyre ... and I wave one hand in a manner meant to clarify but conveying, too, my own internal disorientation.

The phrase halts and skips, the whole thing judders and squeaks out of me like the steam coming up through the pipes in the wee hours last night. It had jerked me awake again and again, first steam of the autumn, interrupting my dreams even as it soothed, invoking the memory of the restless old radiators of the house of childhood.

Do not ask me how to get to that place either -- the directions would be even less clear.

spike

This morning's dream involved, somehow, opting for a double helping of otters. I believe I checked a box for 'extra otters,' and this meant that a forest over which I had some great and unexplained authority would duly be stocked with twice the usual allotment of wiggly, water-loving mustelids, as if the forest had been a latté ordered with an extra shot of espresso. Though I had no idea what the standard otter allotment might be, I nonetheless woke feeling optimistic, even peppy.

Then, in the forenoon, a casual glance out the window met with the sight of a young buck on the roof of the adjacent garage. He did not see me. He made a leggy clockwise circuit, sniffing the tar paper with unhurried interest, but, finding nothing compelling, then stepped off silently into the trees, vanishing in seconds. Perhaps he was disappointed not to have found it a two-deer garage.

oi bara

Bara Ijosmyndari for the New York Times

.Eru þeir að grínast?

Bara Ijosmyndari for the New York Times.

Nei, því miður ... svona standa orðin fyrir neðan myndunum í greininni "Iceland Woos America with Lamb and Skyr." Ekki beint ljóðræn heldur, þessi fyrirsögn. En hvað um það. Og ég mun komast yfir það, að sjálfasta Times stafar Þrír Frakkar með P-i, þó að hneykslandi sé að blað blaðanna í BNA skyldi ekki einu sinni setja th í stað þórnsins.

En hitt er ansi ljót mistök.

Auk þess að við sitjum uppi með ýmsar spurningar: Hver tók þessar myndir?

Bára ljósmyndari, Einhversdóttir?

Eða bara ljósmyndari . . . bara einhver ljósmyndari . . . ?

í horni

Clatter in the jays this morning. One is standing on the roofline of the next house, crest up, looking offended. The crows, too, are in greater disarray than usual. Between their cawings and croakings the cause of this unrest is audible. In one of the trees nearby there is a young hawk. I can hear him, and so can the local corvids, but I cannot see him.

akt 5, scene 5

I had half an onion in the refrigerator, and I felt the beans needed about a half-onion-worth of diced, translucent, savory, sulfuric bulb, so I unwrapped it and chopped it. But it was the root-end half, the remainder resulting from the onion having been split along its equator rather than pole to pole, top to bottom (the way as I habitually halve onions after trimming both roots and the base of the leaves), and so I ended up chopping it in a new way, looking with interest after each slice to see if any contours emerged that were new or unfamiliar in any way.

Part of what is so pleasing about onions when one is cooking and wielding the long vegetable knife oneself is that they are already sliced in one direction. That direction is concentric, but no matter. Dicing an onion still requires maybe a third fewer cuts than dicing almost anything else. If you have diced a lot of onions, you know this, and I have.

But I had not (or not often, or not recently) made these particular cuts through an onion, sliced it just this way. The internal geometry of an onion is complex and layered, and I thought it might reveal itself in a new way, perhaps a dramatically new way, sliced in this unfamiliar manner. I watched carefully. I did not notice anything very remarkable, but it is possible that I missed it.

lakið

Dozing between waking and breakfast I dream more, of my grandmother, of her picking up a dark, shawl-like cloth, burgundy or black and covered with hundreds of red-dyed mother of pearl buttons of different sizes. Some of them had fallen off, but the broken thread-ends showed where they had been.

It was her conception sheet, she said, and I understood that to be the sheet on which she had been conceived by her parents. I understood that it had been saved, decorated, given to her by her mother when she had married.

And then I wasn't talking to her anymore so much as seeing, first and briefly, her parents, a married couple from such a different age than the present one, and next and in more detail the society that saves and passes down conception sheets, that has, no doubt, a better, native word for them than that. A people who might have felt they knew with certainty on what sheet each child had been made. The men are away a great deal in seasonal labor, perhaps away in fishing camps, twelve to a hut and twelve to a boat, only home for brief periods. Their wives would know, would save the cloth and wash it, sit with the other women and talk while sanding the shell buttons and sewing them on.

dragons & ponies

(looking up from book) "What's a dragoon?"

"Eh, a kind of cavalry. Medium, I think."

"Sounds like dragon."

"Yeah, it does. I have no idea what the etymology is. Hang on. (typing) Here we go, it does come from dragon, in French. Dragoons were mounted musketeers, and the muskets belched smoke and flames and so were called dragons by the French. At least by one account."

"Interesting."

"Oh, and it's also a verb. 'To subjugate by force,' as by sending a bunch of dragoons in, or simply 'to compel.' And in 1828 there was another sense: 'to persecute by abandoning to the rage of soldiers.' Clearly a case of verbing going on there."

"Verbing also being a case of verbing."

"Indeed. Wait, this is weird. Dragoon also appears in another 1828 definition, that of bidet."

(laughs)

"I learn that in 1828 a bidet was a small horse issued a dragoon to carry his baggage."

"Carry it to the latrine?"

"Ah, it makes perfect sense. Bidet is French for pony, from Old French bider, 'to trot', and the older type of bidet was meant to be straddled, rather like one would straddle a horse."

"Fascinating."

"Yeah, language is a funny thing."

"Sheds a whole new light on 'the trots.'"

(makes strangled noise)

stuðlun

Noh.

To see a new, or rather old, use for stuðlaberg, try searching for pictures with the string "Nan Madol." It makes me wonder what other paths architecture in Iceland could have taken. What would Guðjón Samúelsson built, had he known of these antipodal islands?

út í bláinn

Idle trolling of the veraldarvefur reveals that Traaie Coon means narrow shore, in Manx. Or at least someone claims it does.

Also that Luke 12:47-48 (in what edition, I have no idea) describes hell thusly:

That was the only light anyone ever saw in that place. The shore will be nearly gone, as the lake becomes full of the bodies of fallen angels and men, lapping close to the edge of the Bottomless Pit. If there are degrees of punishment as there are degrees of reward, then some will be cast on that narrow shore.

Not much better is Tacitus's description of the bank of the Sea of Judea, as translated by Thomas Gordon in 1737. It concludes with this note:

Moreover, into the sea of Judæa the river Belus discharges itself: The sands gathered at its mouth are, with a mixture of nitre, melted into glass. This is but a narrow shore, yet by such as are daily draining it of its sands, found to be inexhaustible.

Vergil's Æneid, book 4 (in translation by John Dryden), speaks of another land:

This little spot of land, which Heav’n bestows,
On ev’ry side is hemm’d with warlike foes;
Gætulian cities here are spread around,
And fierce Numidians there your frontiers bound;
Here lies a barren waste of thirsty land,
And there the Syrtes raise the moving sand;
Barcæan troops besiege the narrow shore,
And from the sea Pygmalion threatens more.
Propitious Heav’n, and gracious Juno, lead
This wand’ring navy to your needful aid:
How will your empire spread, your city rise,
From such a union, and with such allies?

Robert Louis Stevenson's "To all that love the far and blue" is cheerier, addressed to those who pursue the fleeing corners on foot---

Or, bolder, from the narrow shore
Put forth, that cedar ark to steer,
Among the seabirds and the roar
Of the great sea, profound and clear --

storytime

Reading David Perkins's Is Literary History Possible? (Johns Hopkins UP), I find the author noting the poverty of emplotments available for oraganizing events in narrative literary history:

The possible plots for narrative literary history can be reduced to three: rise, decline, and rise and decline. The reason for this is that the hero of a narrative literary history is a logical subject --- a genre, a style, the reputation of an author --- and the plots are limited to what actions or transitions can be predicated of such heroes. They cannot, for example, go on a quest or be tormented in a love triangle.

What a pity!

And imagine if this were not the case. In my mind's eye, I see Ibsen's Reputation as a Playwright engaged in a biting feud with the Deconstructionist Turn. It would be played out in all the papers with an occassional volley from the International Reception of Scandinavian Literature.

And there, the Romantic Poetry riding out in full armor to the rescue of the Late Gothic Novel, imprisoned in a distant tower by Post-War Psychoanalytic Fiction and his co-conspirator, Social Realism. He will be aided, perhaps, by the Debate on the True Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays.

So much potential. And to think that Mr. Perkins answers his own titular question in the negative.

spook

Today I found myself shopping for the ghost dog. This sounds like a lonely enterprise, but I had company. We admired the snappy collars, poked at dried pig's ears, hefted ceramic water bowls, squeezed squeaky toys. We were unsure of the specific tastes of the ghost dog. Did he prefer rubber or rawhide? Was he the type to de-squeak the noisier sort of toy before commencing serious play? Was he (or she?) acrobatically inclined, a chaser of flying rings and disks?

So much uncertainty. The shop owner asked if we were looking for something specific, and we demurred, slunk out without buying anything, tails between our legs.

ys

I have been to New Orleans only once, and it was a long time ago. I remember abundant bougainvillea, wrought-iron railings, cannon, narrow cobblestone streets with gutters running down the middle, chicory coffee and the hot, sweet doughnuts at Cafe du Monde. In fact I have thought of those narrow streets and gutter in the middle every time I have walked down Bankastræti (often to Kaffi París, in search of kaffi og kleinur) where a similar gutter cuts the pavement.

That the key to my memory of that southern city should have been drainage strikes me as sadly appropriate today. And it is not Reykjavík or Paris or the original Orleans that comes to mind, but Ys (or Is). There is a poem; here is its first verse:

In the weird old days of the long agone
Rose a city by the sea;
But the fishermen woke, one startled dawn,
On the coast of Brittany,
To hear the white waves on the shingle hiss,
And roll out over the city of Is,
And play with its sad débris.

sigil

Out making the rounds under that gleaming schooner of a moon they went from old place to old place, sipping wine and coffee and memory. Once, they were confounded: the bar closed, the door locked, the handle bound with wire, and the wire fixed with a seal. This too was, in its way, appropiate. There was nothing to do but stroll to the stone-paved brink of the pond and gaze up at that other silver seal, stamped with the crest of night. Nor did they howl up at it or whine, only yipped softly a little bit.

sjávargler

I was there again, í fjörunni, picking up rounded pieces of glass and stuffing them deep into my pockets. Green, teal, blue, pink, amber, all frosted and looking too much like gumdrops to set safely in a bowl on the table. Someone might break a tooth.

Instead they are in a straight-sided glass, covered in water and placed in the window where they can catch the light and shine more like they did where I found them, light að sunnan skimming the water and catching them broadside, making them flare like gems against the black pebbles. But this water is fresh. They do not smell of salt here, not any more than everything else does, of sweat, after a too-warm day.

There are other salty waters, it occurs to me. Amber washed up on northern beaches was called, in poetry, Freyja's tears. She had wept for her husband Óðr, who had gone away and never returned. Judging by the rest of the mythology, she got over it, but the world got amber for her heartbreak.

These pseudo-gems are not so precious as amber. They are, in fact, the smooth-polished garbage of a hard-drinking people, the thick bases of bottles scoured into lemon-drop shapes by basalt and waves. But then amber is mere tree sap. There should be some lofty story for these colored stones too, I think, some tragedy or some deed.

greiða

Landed in a heap, it feels like, the fjaðrahamur still awry even the next day. At the edges of conversation squawks and caws sneak in between words. Her interlocutor smiles patiently, reaches behind her ear and smooths a couple of feathers down where they are sticking up at crazy angles.

leiðarljósin

The light coming up in the southeast sometime approaching 4:00 AM, hesitant and blue, illuminating the harborward edge of the ripples in the black wakes of each duck and merganser silently a-paddle on the Tjörn. A quarter moon still out, shining like a wet quartz pebble on a black beach, Mars (like red jasper) surprisingly close and bright. Here and there clouds like tufts of wool caught on the wire fence between the pastures of day and night. Here and another place, high, high up, short flickers of green on the move -- loftskeyti from the Great Dark: ég bið að heilsa, ég bið að heilsa.

And then the sun sweeps up and I'm off.

þúast

Þú ert . . . Ertu?

I have been hearing these phrases as Thou art and Art thou? for a couple of weeks now. That is strange and new. It's not that I've only just recognized the cognates, either -- they were always fairly obvious -- but that they are hitting the ear in a new way, like fragments of early modern speech or of Amish dialogue. Except that they do not sound arch to me. Rather, I am hyperaware of the familiar register, that it is þú not þér, thou not you. That this is now the dominant register since sometime last century does not seem to matter. Þér (like vér) is moribund, good only for humor. Still, the echo of thou art cements þú in my mind as an intimate address. It's Thule familiaris, and we're á dús, we two.

skákfylgja

I saw Bobby Fischer on Hverfisgata the other night.

This was a strange experience. I grew up in a looking for Bobby Fischer world. Not that I personally was looking for him, not being a dedicated chess player. But the world was a certain way, Fischer was out there somewhere as a kind of mysterious guardian spirit of chess, and no one knew just where.

Now it seems we are in a rakst á Bobby Fischer á Hverfisgötu world.

It may help to know that Hverfisgata is the dope and hash street, the place to get stabbed over drugs if you're looking to do that sort of thing in Reykjavík (and in which case it is avisable to make a reservation). Seeing Bobby there, I did not recognize him until he was pointed out to me. He looked like every other slightly seedy fellow on Hverfisgata.

Mind you, the National Theater (booming 1930s architecture, 50% national romanticism and 50% fascistic federalism) is there too, and what used to be the library, now the Culture House (Þjóðmenningarhúsið), as well as a lovely older wood-frame building in which now resides the increasingly international International House (Alþjóðahúsið). There are basalt pillars set into the street between them. I was heading down towards Lækjargata and Bobby was coming up.

Of course, I grew up in a Geysislaus world as well, a world in which Geysir no longer erupted, only his little brother Strokkur. Strokkur I've seen go off many times, but Geysir never. Judging from old prints and travel descriptions, it was very impressive. Then in 2000 the earthquake hit on 17. July, while everyone was outside drinking the health of the nation, and Geysir began erupting again. Not often and not reliably, but still. Astonishing. It was as if an island full of dinosaurs had been discovered. Geysir að gjósa aftur! Better than coelocanths.

I am less thrilled about Mr. Fischer. I think he was maybe a better guardian spirit than anything. We already have sérvitringar on Hverfisgata.

aldrei týndur

In the cemetary, in the afternoon, I make sure to visit my favorite stone, that of sailors of the Anne af Tofte, a Faroese cutter that went down off Grindavík in the third decade of the last century. Their names are not recorded, the inscription and prayer in Danish, not the local Icelandic and not the Faroese of home. These bold men of the main are memorialized only in the language of the ruling power, and this has always made me wistful. I consider once again these seadogs, only some of whom rest under the stone. The others were lost to the waves.

But today I learn something new, thanks to the new signs I find here and there, offering fróðleikar of various kinds. The stone itself, a great boulder, was brought here from the Faroe Islands. I am pleased to know that.

en sólin er miklu eldri

Today I received kveðjur from both east and west as well as the image of the day flying over Europe towards me (like the sun) on straight wings (but with tired engine?) like the long-winged gulls in the dark lit from below by the lights in front of the university (otherwise magnificent) or like a plane remembered from a song heard long before I had seen this landscape in the slanting light like that seen this morning (terrific sun), sliding under the lip of the rainclouds (quite nicely) and catching them pulling all manner of strange faces, and since then I have heard that song jangling through and between the other words of the day (I do say nicely), and yet somehow I am not despairing (I do mean that) that no one might ever understand what that feels like (actually).

egg

In the grass, just up on a flatter stretch of a field under a jagged mountain behind which a glacier creaked, I stumbled upon several perfectly white, imperfectly round objects. Eggs! I thought. So large! What bird had lain them and then flown off at my approach? I did not remember seeing one. These eggs were not speckled and tapered like those of cliff-nesting gulls or guillemots. What bird, then? Some do nest on the heaths and fields, after all.

With a forefinger, I reached to touch the chalky surface of one, expecting a cool, hard shell. But the egg proved yielding and leathery. At once my imagined bird grew scaley and basilisk-like, a claw on each wing and a whiplike tail, and I had almost become anxious that the animal would soon return to her clutch when I realized that I had found mushrooms.

annáll

Firey dragons were seen in the sky over the harbor. A great crowd of people gathered to watch them. They showed no sign of fear until the rain that had begun simultaneously with the appearance of the dragons grew violent, and then they fled, a great stream of people rushing between buildings and crushing against one another other. Some carried children in their arms or on their shoulders. It is not known what became of the dragons or what their appearance might token.

jalopy

It's a good little car, this one. It works just fine, mostly, zips in and out of the city streets and rattles along the pitted country roads without too much complaint. In the countryside, huge jeeps carrying natives flash on by at twice the speed -- clearly the better way to get from point A to point B. But this little car will do it too, more slowly, to be sure, and with some false starts, some stalling, some inelegant shifting of gears (the shaft sticks). The trick is keeping it oiled up and warm, I think. It only balks and chokes badly if it hasn't been driven in a while. Shame to have to keep it in that old barn so much of the time.

tunglfar

The moon last night was bright and enormous, dwarfing the town like a shining, white cruise ship in the harbor, towering over the tollhouse, the supreme court, the national theater, the office of the prime minister in what used to be the jail, except that it had docked over the pond on the other side of town. If it was not full, it was only missing a nail-paring from the upper left, a mere splinter of a Naglfar lacking. Maybe it had come into port for just such minor repairs. It was too great a tonnage to bob on any waves (and the black water still and smooth anyway, star-speckled but calm). We stood on the quayside and gaped like children at a many-masted tall ship, would have waved little silver pennants if we'd had them.

fuglaskítur

It is krækiber season. Little black, seedy berries hide under the tiny leaves of this ground-hugging plant, and if you are one of those who associates the taste of them with summer, you will find yourself picking them and popping them into your mouth, even though if asked, as I once was by a visitor, if they were good, you might not know how you would answer. You don't eat krækiber because they are good, but because they are krækiber, and because you can.

You might answer that the birds like them quite a lot. Some winged species seems to eat them, perhaps to the exclusion of all else, when possible. I have never seen it happen, but it must be so, for in summer every jutting stone in Iceland has an inky blue-black streak down one side or the other, just behind whatever ridge best presents itself as a perch. It is the veggjakrot of the avian race, graffiti illegible to us, yet unstudied by runologists and readers of hieroglyphs. If you yourself ate krækiber in sufficient quantities, you too could perhaps produce an ink of such enviable glossy hue, but even that would not endow you with the ability to read the writing of birds. Not even Sigurður Fáfnisbani could do that.

fjórðungaorð

Having made the rounds, here are four words from the four quarters:

From the north: ógilslegt
I confess to having coined this myself, upon having a certain gil or gully pointed out to me. It was indeed very unlike a gil for having been smoothed out and leveled in several distinct sections, an ógilslegt gil.

From the east: lágfota
"Short-legs," a very pleasing name for the vixen and a fitting one, if you have ever seen her glide over the ground.

From the south: draugasteinn
"Ghost-stone," the nativist word for chalcedony. I learned it in the East, but it was further south that I saw long veins of it shot through the basalt and scraped smooth by the course of the Svínafell glacier.

From the west (sem er í raun fyrir sunnan): grátberi
"Tears-bearer," one who brings tears, or brings them on. Compare vatnsberi (water-bearer), the designation for Aquarius, or tilberi (to-bearer), the milk-hare witches used to steal milk from other women's cows. I do not think it can be used poetically, of rain.

merlínússpá

All across the South, the waterfalls are falling upward because of the wind. It sounds like a line in a prophecy. Doubtless, there is something in particular that is supposed to happen when all the waterfalls in Suðurlandið flow upward, but whatever it is, I'm sure that it has happened so many times here already that no one takes notice of it any more. It's that kind of place.

Both falls at Núpsstaður were flying up into the clouds. On the other hand, the enormous rock that stands nearby on the cliffs has still not fallen and crushed the farm, as another prophecy says it must someday do, and so all things considered it is probably right and proper that everyone continue to go about his business as usual and not worry about the erratic behavior of waterfalls. The horses are completely unconcerned. They have all turned their blunt hind ends into the wind; all across Suðurland they stand facing westward with their forelocks flying over their heads.

vegna veðurs

Plenty rain and fog coming around the point and into the fjord, and I am thinking that it is really far better to visit these parts in wet weather. After all, one can purchase postcards of postcard-perfect views of green mountainsides and heiðskýrt heavens in every little place one stops for gas, coffee, and chemical-tasting candy. One never sees pictures of the landscape in rain, only sunshine, and that is rather like looking at pictures of professionally made-up people who all claim in the attached self-descriptions to be "upbeat," "have a good sense of humor," and "like having fun."

To see landscape any other way, to see it when it isn't being hresst og skemmtilegt, one has to be there. And isn't that the question, anyway, what it is like when the weather is not so fair? What it looks like after a restless night? Where do the clouds form? Where does the road get slick and dangerous? Does the ground fog pile up into unexpected and beautiful shapes? Where? Does the fading light slice though it all, striking a peak, a high snowfield, a falling beck, blinding you, making you suck in your breath?

borg

She goes all the way out to this northern-facing fjord to pay her respects. She walks through the grass to the jutting hill that dominates this settlement and starts around it, sunwise. She makes two circuits, with downcast eyes and a humble expression, stepping carefully all the while. She sees wild thyme growing near the path. She reaches to brush the tips of her fingers against its red leaves, but she does not pluck it, and she does not stray from the path. Then she sees a while feather crushed into the stoney ground. This she picks up, smooths with her fingers, and stands upright, quill downward, near where it had lain. She continues, now coming around the last third of the second circuit.

A black horse in a nearby paddock whinnies, and she looks up expectantly. Somewhere else nearby, a dog cries. It is a painful sound. Her heart thumps a little faster, and her throat tightens. Walking away now, with eyes downcast once again, she sees before her a round stone, green as the sea, a little smaller than her fist. She smiles, relieved, and picks it up. It feels good in her hand, almost warm.

Driving out, she passes an old man on a bicycle, heading for one of the outer farms. A black dog is bounding through the grass to meet him.

taktu bensín

I've got that light feeling of possibility that comes with a full tank and a rental vehicle. The romance with this sensation may be classically American, the lure of the open road - ! This I feel despite being on an island. It's the fuel that drives the road movie, that classically American genre born of wide-open spaces and cheap gas. But of course, that genre exists here too. The road movie I'm in must be somewhere between Á köldum klaka and Börn náttúrunnar. I do hope it's on the map.

á austurvelli

The dark is returning here. Not the capital-d Dark but the lowercase-d dark that comes again in August, a reminder that September and the equinox is not far away, and then after that the winter and the thicker, colder, weightier Dark that will last until March, when the sky is pierced by slanting light that strikes the mind like the unwelcome tone of an alarm clock. But at the moment, long evenings ease into coolness and extended twilight.

In this dimness last night at eleven I find myself in the square downtown, leaning against the pediment of a statue and talking about whether there have always been odd folk and sérvitringar in this town and why. Behind my interlocutor, on the grass lit obliquely by lights on the footpaths, a bushy-haired man strolls aimlessly, stepping now forward, now right, now back, and it is several minutes before I realize that he is out to air his rabbit.

The rabbit is a dainty black creature (or appears so in the low light - perhaps it was brown, and perhaps there is a whole vocabulary of rabbit color-terms in this language that I have never learned), ears erect, hopping and sniffing on the cool green turf, allowing himself to be herded, gently, by where his master sets each of his feet, now before him, now to one side.

A late summer night is perhaps the only time one can safely air one's rabbit (black, inquisitive) in the town square, let him lollop to and fro without attracting the unwanted attention of passers -by. One's rabbit might be quite a private thing. Still, I imagine it is very good for the rabbit, who must be an apartment dweller without easy access to clean-smelling growing things. It would probably good for everyone to get out now and then of a still, dim evening, and let each of our small, black animals stretch its legs and sniff the air.

swan lake

I saw no ensorcelled maidens, neither in ballet slippers nor in ring-byrnies. But in the shallow water swam fish, wise and well-fed and thus not for the catching. Still, I wondered if one might not, upon eating one, gain the gift of poetry, skáldmælska.

No, wait, wait ... that is another lake. But it is beautiful here, under a mossy mountain like a giant's door jamb, a gatepost before the path to the plains.

velut luna

Some things are different. Fjalakötturinn is back, a high-timbered red house on Aðalstræti, giving me a turn like an architectural ghost, listahönnunardraugur.

Some things are exactly the same, but I had somehow managed to forget all about them. The screens of my bank's cash machines, for example, still flash up a super low-tech graphic of an abacus while counting out the bills. This is such genius (how could a high-tech graphic of an abacus ever be appropriate, I ask?) that I cannot think how it ever slipped my mind.

Some things are always changing but always in the same way. The half-grown gulls bobbing on the water, floating on the weed between the stout basalt pillars, no longer chicks but not yet fully come into the tailored white and black plumage of adulthood, are one of those things.

fuglatal

kríur (bara fáar)
tjaldar
endur (ýmis konar)
æðarfuglar
fýlar
mávar og mávar og aftur mávar

I have not seen the lóa, but that is not her fault. And I have seen starlings, but I heard them before I saw them, and at first they sounded like squirrels.

sundur

The air is cold enough to feel like water, like splashing into a lake you've swum in before, but that surprises again and again -- how did you ever swim in this chill? You know you have, but it seems unlikely. Striking forward into the clear, diamond-like stuff, into the grammar of it, all the muscles seem sluggish and the tongue stiff. You roll and yaw and float, but off balance. Then the mind extends a membranous, stiff, finny wing that has been folded up since January (feeling it unfold, you have to rethink your whole idea of your own symmetry), and it catches the katabatic wind and speeds you forward, faster, faster.

brennisteinslykt

Sulfur rising off the water is not an olfactory hallucination, though it is, to be sure, hallucinatory in the metaphoric sense. But it is only an artifact of the metaphor, of bearing onself from once place to another. It is transitional, and in a few days you won't smell it at all, but the water will be just as hot.

misseri

To every season, osv. osv.

dagbækur

So, do you take the 200-page journal with only 40 pages left in it, in the hope of finally finishing it on this trip, or the new, whippy, luxuriously leather-covered moleskine with the snappy elastic and the creamy paper, in the hope of starting a new chapter, a new volume, even? This is still unclear. But you will bring the swim goggles along.

framköllun

She is just trying to get that roll of film developed. The clerk is not helping. Doubles? Glossy or matte? White borders? How can she possibly decide such things when she really has no idea what is on the film? That's why she's trying to have it developed. That, and because there might be something useful on that roll, since she's going back, something parleyable. She snapped all those pictures furtively on the way up, in haste, shielding the camera from the view of her escorts and their two-headed dogs. Will there be anything on the film at all? Who knows.

She settles on something just to be done with it, gives the clerk her cell number, and jams the slip of paper he hands her into her front pocket, next to the film cannister, now empty of film. The pips of the pomegranate rattle in the black plastic as she walks out into the sunlight.

leones

Last evening, on a neighboring driveway, back turned to the admittedly paltry hurly-burly of the street, a small cat so round-haunched and speckled (gray and ginger) that she resembled a bird's egg.

This evening, inside, gathered like grizzlies at the falls, we slapped anecdotes out of the flowing wine like king salmon, roaring like lions at our own wit.

lost & found

On the street, nay, worse! atop the rubbish bins I see a stray book. Aside from having being abandoned, it does not seem to have been ill-treated in whatever home it had been in last. It is fat and sleek, not very old, either, though not very young. It is a dictionary. I ruffle its pages. It purrs contentedly under my fingers. It seems really in very good condition (who would have orphaned it here? what heartless owner? someone moving away, no doubt, someone who didn't feel he had room for it in the new place), and it is fairly clean for something found nosing about near the bins. There are no marks on it, just two paper tags, one next to the definition of thesis and the other on the page including feral, feracious, ferine, ferly (noh! ferlig?), Fergus, Fenian, and Fenris.

I snap it shut and heft it again (it is hefty), pretending to weigh my options, but I'm fooling myself.

Swinging it up onto my shoulder, I set off again homeward, already picturing how I will rub it down with a damp rag and how well it will get on with my other books.

lammas

On the first of August, the feast of bread, one would, ideally, be in Lyon or some other town of Lugh's, eating baguettes with sweet butter and golden honey and rereading the deeds of the spear-wielding, omnicompetant hero at the battles of Magh Tuireadh. But my own Balor of the Baleful Eye is the clockface, and I have things to do.

kvöldmatur

After sundown, a seasonal, light repast, full of the gold light of the preceding day. There was:

beer

and

quinoa
seasalt
garlic
ginger
the juice of an orange
a little shoyu
very long green beans indeed

úthleypt

How is it that there are always boxes yet unpacked? Even after she seems to herself to be all moved in, settled and fully engaged in living life in the new space, yet more mysterious, taped-shut cardboard boxes will emerge and then weigh unsettlingly on her mind. Do they find each other in the back of the closet and engage in furtive mating rituals, snuffling and rustling beneath the long winter coats, disrupting the neatly lined-up shoes and producing offspring in the form of still more boxes full of unknown, half-remembered articles?

She feels like Pandora in reverse, a packrat of mythic scale. Today several more of them appear, heavy, dense. What could be so important that she bothered to pack it or them in these boxes and haul them here, yet so unessential to daily life that it has not yet been missed? She reaches for the knife with one hand and slices one open, removes its contents, and puts them in their proper places, or places that will pass for proper. Old notebooks half-filled with notes, fiction purchased in distant airports, these are set on a lower shelf; audio cassette tapes - those relics! - stowed in a drawer; whimsical hats stacked above the woolens and foul-weather gear. The empty cardboard she slashes again and folds down, turns into a satisfyingly flat thing with no secrets in it. The activity has a pleasing forward momentum, a feeling of getting things done.

The third box beckons, and she reaches again for the knife, slips the point into the translucent tape and draws it down, down, and it bursts open at her. She is blinded, arms held before her face by reflex, the knife forgotten, and when she opens her eyes to look out past her wrists, she sees the room full of small birds. They wheel in a mass in the cramped space and flow like smoke out the open window. Her skin tingles every place their feathers brushed by her.