through two windows

Chasing the sun from the volcanic tongue of Reykjanes over open water to Greenland, over and onward, the Saint Lawrence Seaway is choked with sea ice wrinkled and cracked like the skin on acrylic paint left too long in the open air. Over Newfoundland the lighter pigments (titanium white and cobalt blue, some aquamarine) seem to have been dragged with a gigantic palette knife over the roughly painted ground (mars black and gesso, dabbed in thickly with a stiff-bristled brush). Some rivers, winding and oxbowed, have been painted in with a soft hair brush afterwards, also with the lighter color. Here and there, almost invisible, are tiny settlements with warm lights (picked out with tapered round brush in palest cadmium yellow).

Later, on the Hudson Line, in the relentless grayness that builds up in this rocky valley in the winter rain, the Palisades are barely visible for the clouds streaming down from the tree-furred clifftops. The great marsh sheltered behind the pier (yellow ochre) is a narrow smudge pushed with the thumb across wet paint. The Hudson River School is not in session here. Or else George Guðni is a visiting professor during the winter qarter.