Narrow Shore

allsoðið

2011-12-19T10:23:00.000-08:00

Boil everything.

This is my post-Yule plan.

Bedclothes, potatoes, the dog's well-gnawed cow bones. (I imagine that will stink.) Some festive hot drink. (To drive out the smell of the bones.) Onions and celery and carrots. (To drive out the remainder.)

Everything must steam before the New Year.

flugþjónn

2011-12-17T21:35:00.000-08:00

That's some fire-some wine. The bartender had never poured a flight of whiskey before (whiskey and fine tequila, actually) and mistook it for a wine flight. (Good God, man!) That is my only explanation for this array of riches. Sombra - Macsomething rye - Lagavulin. I explain to curious tablemates that Lagavulin is Laphroaig once it has grown up and stopped being such an asshole. I tell people to whom I would never normally utter a sentence containing the word asshole.

This photograph is unremarkable (ómerkileg) -- of no particular quality -- but the multiple fingers of Lagavulin were excellent, excellent.

Oh, give thanks for óreyndir bartenders. I feel most tenderly tended to.

nætursýn

2011-12-13T11:06:00.000-08:00

Recent dreams:

The great whale, after museum hours, gets to swim languorously, carefully, about the exhibit hall.

Glass shards in my soles. I hate that. I would have thought my calluses would have protected me, horny like hooves.

What do dreams like that say? Perhaps I am a Danish mermaid.

Meanwhile, his furred ears flick about, his feet (free of glass) and his muzzle twitch, his flanks quiver. I can see the white of his upward-facing eye, but I cannot say what he sees.

morgunspjöll

2011-12-12T19:38:00.001-08:00

Every morning now, every leaf limned with white, every pace stiff and crunchy under the foot. Everything must be nosed over anew.

skín

2011-11-19T08:16:00.001-08:00

The forecast: cloudy, and for once it is correct. I find the trick is not to look out the window.

uppsláttur

2011-11-18T12:25:00.001-08:00

Ever and again trying to wean myself from Wikipedia. I have relapses.

Wiki - rapid. These are not so fast, and my shoulder squeaks when I reach to get one off the high shelf. Not even a shelf, but the top of the bookcase -- nothing between these and the ceiling.

Superior knowledge?

glipp

2011-11-08T17:26:00.000-08:00

fly

by

night.

On the evening rounds, passing young women staring skywards. Is it supposed to be at 6:30? At 9:30? I don't know, I say. I heard I would need a 6-inch mirror on the telescope I don't have to see it. Really? Because of the atmosphere? Because it won't hit the atmosphere, more likely. It won't burn, so there won't give off any light. Oh. How strange!

I move off -- we move off. I feel him rising into a trot next to me. I forgot to fix the blinking red bicycle light to his collar before heading out, and I'm not sure they saw him at all.

ábyrgð

2011-10-23T19:32:00.000-07:00

Today my upper arm jangles like the links hanging over the bicycle's crossbar, securing it to the porch pillar. Every day I crunch the little key into the lock, grind it against whatever crud has lodged in the works over two years of holding the cycles fast against kleptomaniacal, jersey-clad drunks. Then I ride off, holding myself on the heels of my hands, feeling wrists elbows shoulders -- one firm, one rattling over the potholes.

I imagine boney tumblers in the joint. Are they gritty? Frosted? Oiled too stingily or (I fear) too generously?

And where is the key? It must be here somewhere.

vetrarsúpa

2011-10-22T20:38:00.000-07:00

some chicken
bit of beef
smoked sausage
cumin
paprika
onions
garlic
celery
bay leaf
cabbage
tomatoes
whole can good stout
(little cheap burgundy)

Put it in iron, put the iron in the oven over the flame. Time it right, and you'll have it in bowls by the time the first winter's evening falls.

rónahjól

2011-09-25T19:56:00.000-07:00

Sunday morning, already towards noon. A rough Saturday night for the fellow passed out on the neighbor's lawn. Slept where he fell, clearly. Tippled and then tipped right over.

When he comes to, he'll still be unsteady, all Gahhd ... gears feel terrible and Hey, does anyone remember what happened to my seat?

stafir

2011-07-27T09:00:00.001-07:00

Jón Þór Ármannsson?
Jóhannes Þórólfur Árnason?
Jóakím Þórleifur Ákason?

Jóhanna Þóra Ánsdóttir?

During an occupation, yes, but in a kingdom or a republic? At low tide, yes, but before or after June 17? Not long before June, anyway: it's cold on the beach, and the sea wind can be fierce even on a clear day. Maybe in high summer, in a fit of patriotism, in an independent land.

Ísland, vasahnífum skorið!

doppóttur

2011-07-20T09:53:00.000-07:00

It had rained, just a little, the evening before.

heimerniskennd

2011-07-15T08:44:00.000-07:00

Glitskýjabekk
Norðurá
Skróná
Sakandaá
Mylluá
Móhaukaá
Norðmannsgilsá
Morðaragil
Kattagilsá
Æsópusará
Rondóttaá
Kengá
Vapparalækjur
Kasparsgil
Fiskgílsá
Morðaralækjur
Krótoná
Syngjandi
Spargilslækjur
Sagamylluá

lyftarar

2011-07-12T06:50:00.001-07:00

Increasingly, I am seeing them as a couple of birds, doubtless a nesting pair. God knows where they might winter. Clearly, though, they are summering here, having chosen to nest at a cliff base, as so many migratory species do. Huge fulmars or guillemots? Except these are belong to a long-necked species. Cormorants? They are fairly far inland.

I can imagine their entry in some handbook: red body and underside, comparatively short black legs and feet, black neck, gray head. Call sounds like high-pressure paint sprayer with a humming or whining undertone. I see them nestled down in the evenings when I leave work, necks folded and heads resting on their breasts, side by side.

yfir holt og heiði

2011-07-11T02:44:00.001-07:00

I take the shortcut, every day, even though I should turn down the street and walk along the shore while I have the chance. It's silly.

There's something charming about it, though. It goes over a patch of ground cut by paths. There is blágrýti spotted with lichen, birch both great and small, little grass. It's a spot of unbuilt ground and ungrazed. Völvuleiði í stórborginni? Álögublettur? No, because no one would think to mow it. It is a plot from the age of settlement. I walk there every day, footing it over a tiny, tiny heath to work.

dreki

2011-06-29T02:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the safety tape marking out the work zone came loose from one of the orange cones and it thrashed around like the cellophane tail on a dragon kite. It was nice having a dragon in the parking lot as I tapped away here inside even though he blew soot through the window all day. Most of the monsters here are sea creatures, though they do hazard the occasional foray onto dry land, scaring the sheep and terrifying the farmer. The wind-blown dragon was a pleasant change.

Today, the other end has come loose, and the dragon is gone. The cones remain, vörður on the tarmac.

ríkjamennirnir

2011-06-28T04:06:00.000-07:00

Kalfyrningar
Wiscynsingar
Nýjorvíkingar
Minnsytingar
Hnetumenn
Washingar
Orgyningar
Nýhampsýslingar
Norðdakytingar
Suðdakytingar
Litmenn
Kansingar
Arkansingar
Pennskægingar

Nógu í bili.

bless

2011-06-23T09:36:00.000-07:00

There's more than one ever-pure spring here, called from the rock in some earlier age by a man of the cloth. Guðmundr blesses the earth and a stream pours forth.

This water is plenty clean for pool water -- very clean for pool water -- but it's no Guðmundarbrunnur. If it were, what would you talk about? After commenting on the temperature (Þessi er sko ekkert heitur heitur pottur, þessi -or- Þetta er nú almennilegt!) you will see the inevitable hair go by, and you can say Djöfull er vatnið skítugt í dag.

Oh, and there is always politics. Tonight the conversation has already heated up before your arrival: the banks, deregulation, the crash, the villains in suits, helvítis útrásarvíkingar and who is to carry the blame. Thence to Western values, imperialism, human rights. Interventionism, isolationism, kugun kvenna and hverjum er ekki sama.

The one that looks like a biker is talking current events. The other -- older, with his bike club number (in the 1000's) tattooed on his shoulder -- is talking history. It's not his business, our business, if people are oppressed somewhere else. Let them sort it out. No people can be oppressed indefinitely.

But they can be wiped out, can't they, or nearly so? It's happened before.

Oh, but only if they let it happen!

Jæja. Time to hit the showers. Djöfull er vatnið skítugt í dag.

um öxl

2011-06-04T13:44:00.000-07:00

Looking back already from the end of the road not yet stepped out upon, not this time. Soon.

skáli

2011-04-20T07:43:00.000-07:00

Away from home, but the promised paradisaical valley was only just recovering some green. It pokes up through the black. The change was already begun. I imagine the local vættir will have taken advantage of the stuccoed changing rooms by now, the masculine beings on one side and the feminine on the other.

*heorcian

2011-03-19T21:47:00.000-07:00

It's bright tonight. Listen:

beorcan
*berkanan
berkja

A star to every wandering bark?
A moon instead, coursing in the dark.

íshestr

2011-02-04T09:44:00.000-08:00

Before this most recent slathering of icing came, I had found the one prior suddenly hovering an inch off the ground everywhere -- the whole town shifted out onto hanging ice. Treacherous. The earth must have contracted overnight, leaving its snowy girth loose.

I've met horses who do that, except they wait until after you've hauled on the buckle strap as hard as you can to cinch the saddle fast. Then they let out the breath they'd (cannily) been holding in their barrel ribs. Climb into that perch, and you'll find yourself listing dangerously as the beast takes to the trot over rocky ground.

On the hanging ice, no less slippery for its altitude, I can too easily see myself suddenly slung under the belly of the world like the hapless rider in the old paper puzzle before you've worked out the trick of it.

fast

2011-01-29T15:20:00.001-08:00

That's interesting.

...

Well, not very interesting -- but a little interesting.

inni

2011-01-03T19:03:00.000-08:00

wax
porcelain
bronze
glass
ink
tea

and fog on the inside of the window.

Stay in, keep warm. Have another cup.

...nýtt

2011-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

Everything throbs, and you scoop them up (raw, still, the insides of a younger person) and press them, flat-palmed, into your dancing partner's warm hands.

gamalt ...

2010-12-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

Always the first notes have you scowling into the flashing lasers, wondering what oldie it could possibly be, that you don't remember it, but with a few more bars the guitar line has caught your flesh under your ribcage, the hook piercing years of built-up shell and pulling the soft guts of your adolescence onto the dance floor.

strengleikar aftur

2010-12-30T10:28:00.000-08:00

Just starting to untangle the twang of tilde and lassoing j. Grateful to have been able to dredge up the really essential words (like baño), but unable to shake them fully free of later accretions, the vine-y growth of northern orthographies that tugs at sounds even as they leave my own mouth. It will be days before I can use the facilities without thinking of bluegrass music.

loptnet

2010-11-20T10:35:00.000-08:00

My wireless goes out and I swear softly and pad downstairs to inspect the router and the phone plug. This involves leaning past the furry curl of dog, a Garmr in his Gnípahellir waiting patiently for Ragnarök in the hope that it will involve running with mouth agape, scooping up forbidden edibles when the doors of the kitchen cabinets are flung wide. I peel up the edge of his plush bed, but he does not stir. Only his ears flick about, and only for a moment.

The ears are always up, whether the beast is dreaming with eyes rolled back or trying to charm a roast fowl out of my hands through the sheer intensity of his gaze, whether sirens are dopplering past outside or not. I do not know what secret channel he is tuning in to. It is evident, however, that his connection is more reliable than mine.

ártíðarárstíð

2010-11-18T12:30:00.000-08:00

Any other time, I would say that dreams of cascading lights in the night sky were only psychic afterimages of too many hours spent watching British science fiction. It would not be a convincing case this time.

port

2010-10-10T19:00:00.000-07:00

sá beinlausi

2010-09-06T19:15:00.000-07:00

Chopping romaine for a salad, I see the triangular rib in section, and I am back in a light rain in Ísafjörður's harbor watching a spry little man turn a by-caught sea monster into a neat stack of slabs. It was boneless but not spineless, like all of its kind. With two long knives the man sheared though the cartilaginous column, revealing the circle-in-triangle that runs the length of the beast, translucent and containing whatever squaline ichor served it as a brain.

The boneless rib of a leaf of romaine is just the same shape, has just the same translucence.

áheitt

2010-09-02T20:31:00.000-07:00

Too hot for anything, even too hot to muster earnest prayer for rain. You have to keep lapping water merely to retain the privilege of being drenched with sweat. Last night was the same. Floundering in the salty bed, unable to push off from the insomniac shore, you found yourself making pious promises to anyone with the power to grant you a merciful drowning in sleep.

vesturferðarvísur anno 2004

2010-08-12T19:11:00.000-07:00

Harmur var Hrímgrundi
að halda frá
Ísafold yfirgefa
ástvini kveðja
Alþreytt á Manhattan
millilending
fyrsti áfanginn
yfirstaðinn.

Hún kom til landsins við Langey og keyrði úr Konungsfylki vestur til Manhattan-eyjar. Þar heyrðist karlmannsrödd kveða í haug einum við veginn:

Greenwich Village
Vesturbær
Staten Eyland
Austurbær
Bronx og Battery
Brooklyn, Queens
Harlem, Miðbær
Miklagarður.

Hún kvað á móti:

Sæll vertu Stuyvesant
stjóri borgar fyrrum
Pétur tréfótur
traustur hollendingur
Segðu mér af öllu
á eyjunni litlu
Hvað er að frétta
fræga bænum af?

Pétur tréfótur kvað á móti:

Bruna gummíbátar
á bylgjum árinnar
vopnaðir vélbyssum
vel útbunir
gamla miðborgin
morandi i löggum
öryggisástand
aukið mjög.

*

asterion

2010-08-03T20:26:00.000-07:00

Well-starred.

rime

2010-08-02T03:28:00.000-07:00

If they ever tear that place down, plow it under, or refurbish it, I will be very sad. The Kreppa will probably preserve it in its núverandi form, however.

This summer the heitir pottar were full of the usual suspects:

Ormtyngdur former institute director backtalking his colleagues
Broad-faced giant absently fiddling with his own nipples
A young bóndi from Dalasýsla reminiscing about the countryside with men much older than he by enumerating the things vanished from his valley: the slaughterhouse, the children, the majority of the sheep
Pensioner with an unending book project that brings him daily to his desk at the library and then to his evening soak
The usual token foreigner, oblivious to the content of the skvaldur around him

The poster outside touts the health-giving properties of the minerals suspended in these waters. It does not mention the pipes in the showers, ever more encrusted with those same minerals. It does not mention the encrustation of chattering characters on the edges of the hot tubs, but I have even greater faith in their salutary effects on body and soul.

skel

2010-08-01T14:39:00.000-07:00

loðinn

2010-07-31T10:47:00.000-07:00

plastpoki

2010-07-30T07:24:00.000-07:00

sneið

2010-07-29T20:17:00.000-07:00

fyrir horn

2010-07-28T08:43:00.000-07:00

efst

2010-07-27T08:42:00.000-07:00

heimamaður

2010-07-26T08:18:00.000-07:00

whorl

2010-07-25T10:39:00.001-07:00

þræða

2010-07-05T07:06:00.000-07:00

Where the hell are we? Í Vogunum? I don’t even know where that is, though I might have imposed on a friend’s hospitality there one summer. Winter? I cannot remember.

Has this place finally become a country of not only memory but also - sometimes - forgetfulness? Oh, thank god. I don’t need every paving stone to send a shock of recognition up through me as I walk the streets. No one does.

Let’s get some ice cream. No, I’ve never been to this place before. Is it new?

hundbaki

2010-06-30T12:41:00.000-07:00

I can only remember feeling my legs forward of his ribcage, his ruff standing to all sides, his ears pricked forward, the pacingness of his padding along.

svanur

2010-06-29T02:45:00.001-07:00

How can one not fall in love with a land where you can name a male child Swan?

And why not. There they are on the pond, swimming with muscular strokes, arching their thick necks like stallions, dipping daggerish black-rimmed beaks into the water. A swan can break your back with his wings. Why not allow men to call themselves after these birds? Ask Leta -- she knows.

But I am missing my own point. The question is rather why we should not name men for the swans' other qualities: their grace, their weightlessness on water, their beauty and feathers and loveliness.

rúntur ii

2010-06-27T06:09:00.000-07:00

Huldumaður á reykjabílnum, -bílnum. Röfluðum um ekki neitt, neitt. Keyrðum út á Nesið, Nesið. Keyrðum svo á eftir heim, heim.

Nú fer hann aftur vestur, vestur. Meðan að ég hang' í bænum, bænum. Fer hann aftur til að róa, róa. Meðan að ég labba gangstétt, gangstétt.

Svon' er rúnturinn hjá okkur, okkur. Svo hefur verið nú í mörg ár, mörg ár. Tökum rúntur hverju sumri, sumri. Og kveðjum svo að sumarlokum, -lokum.

rúntur

2010-06-22T11:20:00.000-07:00

It would be aimless if it were not einstefna. No markmið, just the rounds from one mið to another.

Once, someone laughed at me for asking whether we shouldn't have a map with us. "There's only one road! It goes around!"

Keep an eye on the level of the water, though. If it washes over the road (and it might) then there is no way back but forward. Your only possible destination becomes the place you just left.

hulduskútan

2010-06-21T09:00:00.000-07:00

Keyrandi norður úr Akureyri
sá ég skip prýtt rauðu segl;
Ég leit á þig og spurði
hvort þú sást það og.

Áratugi seinna eru línurnar loksins á rétta málinu. Ég man vel eftir því, að sjá skútuna við huldubyggðina á Eyjafirði. Aldrei að vita, aldrei að vita, þó það væri bjartur hásumarsdagur, sólskín og allt. Hvur veit, hvur veit.

Er hægt að vera ásthrædd eins og sumir eru guðhræddir? O, hvé mikið ég vildi trúa.

heimkoma

2010-06-12T06:16:00.000-07:00

It's likely the smell of twenty-odd people trudging up and down two, four, six times a day. Of outside shoes left by the doors. Of round-robin Saturday cleaning and only one brand of washing fluid. Of velkomin heim and here's the mop.

blátt

2010-05-21T14:23:00.000-07:00

Little blue shattering. I have a strange desire to poke my finger into it like a thimble and feel the chalky shred of membrane still clinging to the inside.

papprakki

2010-05-13T15:42:00.000-07:00

Paper, from papyrus (Lat.), from papyros (Gk.), perhaps from some older, Egyptian word. Paper from the crushed and moistened boles of stately forest giants. Clearly, it feels good on the gums, even to an animal whose back-more teeth are meant for shearing flesh. He returns gas bills, grocery lists, paperbacks and love notes to their primal pulp.

He is a dreaming beast, however. In his walnut brain he may imagine vellums and parchments between his jaws; he may savor chewy monkish scribblings, psalms and hymns still tasting of lamb.

sæfjallabarnið

2010-04-21T10:12:00.000-07:00

Leið erumk fjöll,
vark-a ek lengi á,
nætr einar níu;
ulfa þytr
mér þótti illr vera
hjá söngvi svana.

Sofa ek né máttak
sævar beðjum á
fugls jarmi fyrir;
sá mik vekr,
er af víði kemr,
morgin hverjan már.

Snorri differentiates between true history and the mythological lies of the Æsir. Historically, Njörðr and Skaði have children, but I do not believe in history.

If they had managed, in myth, to stay together long enough, what would a daughter have been like? She must have loved both fell and wave. Gulls must have flown overhead in her dreams and wolves circled her bed.

hvaleygður

2010-04-02T03:53:00.000-07:00

Waning three-quarters, and I've been following its arc across from telephone pole to rooftop this whole night. Tap tap tap, and another orb follows me the while. It rolls under his brow where he lies, ears pinned back and paws tucked up, back arched for a smooth plunge into whatever dream offers itself next.

hundaheili

2010-03-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

There's a whole world in there, even if it is too dark to read.

He dreams at least twice daily. The machine is pneumatic, driven by the black bellows of his chest. You hear it from across the room when the switch is thrown, or the coal piled on, or however the dwarflike governors of dream start the thing in motion: the air is sucked into the engine and then expelled, moist with fantasies of squirrels and twittering birds. He runs (you can see his feet twitch), he snarls (you can can see his lips wrinkle), and he laps water (you can hear his tongue slapping in his mouth). Chasing even shadows of cats as these is thirsty business. The artificers can be justly proud of their work and ring for more coal from below.

å

2010-03-11T20:20:00.000-08:00

She has been under the river for months, face turned upwards, with the winter flowing over and around and past her. Now finally she comes to: Long ragged lines being cut into the surface from above. The birds are returning.

seltjörn

2010-02-05T06:49:00.000-08:00

Waiting for the computer to come to life again, gazing off into the falling snow outside with one hand draped over the rim of my cup, I am about to forget that I have made coffee at all -- the toasty smell overpowered, perhaps, by the room's other scents of cold air and warm dog -- until one sleepy fingertip grazes its surface. I look down and see the pupil-black hole I have inadvertently punched in the crema. Fissures extend outward from it in all directions. It looks like an aerial photograph I once saw of a seal's breathing hole in the late summer sea ice, meltwater streaming slowing into it. Now I will will be able to watch the ice break up as I sip the level down. The snow is still falling.

að nykrast

2010-02-03T10:42:00.000-08:00

áframhjáhald
þolinmæðulegur
tölvuskjálfandi
reiðihjól
miskunnulegt

nefna

2010-01-30T18:36:00.000-08:00

There's a chatter in the background, the sound of a breeze rustling though memory, and these days I hear names it in I haven't heard for a very long time. But no one comes when I call them, which is a pity.

dreams of you all through my head

2010-01-24T15:39:00.000-08:00

On the second day he lay half-curled on a new cushion in a new house and dreamed while we watched. His brow twitched, his toes clenched, his lips curled, and his eyes flicked under their lids after something that frightened him -- his hackles bristled.

If the despairing among us are haunted by a black dog, what anxious dreams plague the black dog in turn?

skjarr

2010-01-18T08:28:00.000-08:00

Tap tap tap twice now through my dreams, a low black form, tail held humbly aft and down. Someone should clip your toenails soon. Someone kind who waits for you to get a little less shy.

*sneigʷʰ-

2010-01-09T13:16:00.000-08:00

It is still coming down here and elsewhere. A friend new-settled far from home sends satellite images of Britain alhvítt, the hilly west buried under drifts of nyf. Elsewhere: snjór, Schnee, sneg. Apparently it is an old word, derived only from itself and not from some root meaning "white" or "cold" or "winter." Elemental. Basic.

People who like to theorize such things like to place cold and heavy clouds over the original homeland of the original speakers, and then work out where it lay with the weather report in hand. I don't think I believe in that country anymore. I'm not sure I believe in the language of original speakers.

Let the kinship of tongues be enough without elevating their originals above the now. We can all be equally at home (or abroad) in our different snowy places.

bjalla

2010-01-02T08:08:00.000-08:00

Still remembering an image from the holiday rush from (how strange, still!) last year:

This one from the 3/4-size faux town square that increasingly serves as the hub of all retail activity hereabouts. You drive there and then you stroll about, pretending that you strolled all the way there -- after all, it couldn't be far in this quaint and obviously old little brick-built settlement. Older places are so nice that way. Forget your troubles, your exurban ennui, and above all the massive parking lots extending in all directions, just past the Potemkin village facades of the Limited and Ann Taylor.

Now add the further pleasure of hearing the lazy hooves of bored and be-jingled horses on the pavement (someone's oversight not to put in cobbles -- but overlook this) pulling carriages of shoppers. Ring in the season, urge their lackadaisical drivers, whether you like it or not, and chew not the bit. Surely, one of them has a poetic bent and, as he swings his furry hocks in time, is mulling on the bells bells bells bells bells bells bells.

hringja inn

2010-01-01T19:54:00.000-08:00

Ears still ringing with a decade's worth of recollection, though not this last one's. Instead, echoes of that more distant era of even more regrettable fashions. (Lucky I was so unfashionable at the time -- it cuts down my quotient of regrets.) I remember tweaking the dial of a cheap clock radio infinitesimally leftward in search of the weak signal of a distant college station (calculus abandoned on the desk), hoping to hear minor keys and dissonances sputtering though between the Classic Rock and the Top Forty.

Nice to visit, just now, much later and having escaped the pains peculiar to then, all in order to mark the present sliding into the past and the numbers ticking over into the future, all in a reliable and familiar time signature. Step to it and wave your hands, now, and step again.

í fjösinu

2009-12-20T06:04:00.000-08:00

Little, shaggy, and about six of them, all milling about. Actually little, even á íslenskum mælikvarða, with heads no higher than mine. It was warm inside, as you'd expect.

kreista

2009-12-10T17:55:00.000-08:00

It's freezing out -- not the adjective but the present progressive. The fallen leaves at the edges of the road are getting rimey, hoary, paperish. If only I rise early enough tomorrow, I will have the pleasure of crunching them underfoot like a colossus bent on long-prophesied destruction, like a vintner squeezing from his crop the juice of a winter wine.

If I feel guilt afterwards, I will make a note to pour a libation on the roots of the maple on the windward side of the house.

hvítt, svart

2009-12-07T20:50:00.000-08:00

It's a matter of practicality: You ice the white halves first, or a little more than half, because the dark half should overlap. Ice them first and then take the remaining icing back to the boiler and pop the chocolate in. (You see now the practical aspect, yes?) Put in some cocoa, too; that makes it even darker. Go back and ice the other halves. Let them overlap just a bit. Let it set. Seal them in a box so the mice don't get at them in the middle of the night.

Sleep. Even with the curtains open, you will not be troubled by the moonlight. It is waning from full.

Wake to find snow falling on the streets, white on black.

nifl

2009-11-29T14:23:00.000-08:00

Standing there (and a little later, lying on our bellies to peer over) it became clear that Niflheimr, that realm of mists, is not below us but north (as are many other strange places), and that sometimes it may creep a little southward, even in daylight.

ágúst

2009-11-22T17:08:00.000-08:00

hinge

2009-11-19T14:23:00.000-08:00

The heavy door of the inevitable swings on it, the anything but unforeseen event, and all afterwards arcs towards you, nothing in its way able to offer resistance. That is the way it is.

gneisti

2009-11-18T20:17:00.000-08:00

I'm talking on the phone when it gutters finally out, but that's alright. I saw it go.

hrap

2009-11-17T09:39:00.000-08:00

I hadn't meant to be awake, but I was. This to no avail, though: no sky for the dingy clouds.

I always thought of the Perseids as mine. We'd lie on the blanket on the sand and stare up, hopeful. It was August and cold from ocean wind. (Daytime was hot, nevertheless, and full of scrub forest blueberries.) Sometimes we saw a few streaks and flashes, moving pinpricks. I remember being impatient and chilly and grumbling internally that I seemed never to have been looking in the right direction, always hearing the Oh! a split second too late. But sometimes even I saw them, zooming wing-shod near the zenith.

The Leonids have been yours for years now. There were clouds here and the gray-mauve light of the downtown besides. Perhaps I was merely looking in the wrong direction and too late. On Suðurnes they saw it three days ago, so bright they thought it must be something much greater than a falling star.

ódæmt

2009-11-16T20:12:00.000-08:00

People furrow their brows and correct me, but it is a good word and not unattested (ekki ódæmt) in the old language. I see no reason not to use it. Fádæmt is fair enough, and eindæmt. I have seen it rendered as unexampled, which is perfect. It, too, is not a word that strikes the English speaker's ear without announcing its own archaism. What to do with such words? Give them up (at least in public) to sound more like the living natives or enjoy their contours but sound hopelessly twee? Tveir kostir og hvorki góður.

safn

2009-11-14T20:36:00.000-08:00

Raw red lentils in a green-glazed bowl. This is one of the transient pleasures of mouse-proofing the ground-floor cabinets. Everything that might, even through crinkly plastic, attract the attention of the little nibblers must be re-stored in tooth-defying glass. Beans, grain, flour, raisins, linguini. Everything sifted out of its original packaging (all the boxes flattened and stacked and slid into one of the brown grocery bags that originally bore them home) and put into jam jars, pickle jars, mustard jars, tomato sauce jars. Red lentils now in the bowl, now pouring them into the former habitation of long-gone sauerkraut. Put them by the chickpeas, barley, black beans, orzo. Shut the doors. Imagine the mice returning after midnight to find a museum of food, all the exhibits safe behind glass.

tristes arctiques

2009-11-08T17:19:00.000-08:00

They say we've moved on from his ideas (which we I am not sure, but people keep implying to me that it should include me), but I still find that meanings arise most in the interstices, the gaps between pairs of things we thought we knew.

I heard his voice on the radio a year ago while I clattered the tools of culture against each other in the kitchen and brought my savage raw potatoes to a boil on the stove: He was saying something about no longer being so fond of the world. Perhaps the next one will provide fresh (yet delicately prepared) food for new thoughts.

laufum

2009-10-28T11:21:00.000-07:00

And then, suddenly, it is all yellow. Two cold nights, and there is not patch of black macadam to be seen. Two hours of wet wind, and the string of cars along the curb are magnificently decoupaged.

húsmús

2009-10-14T13:11:00.001-07:00

Mouse! I think a mouse. It was moving very quickly from out the heap of recyclables across the cheap tiles and through the absurdly large gap in the baseboard under the sink. (Thence, doubtless, down the pipes in the wall to the basement, but that was out of my sight.) A trap is procured - a humane one.

I learned somewhere, however, that releasing these little animals in the wild is not more humane than killing them at home. They are house mice, not field mice, and they have no way to feed themselves out in the grasses and ground cover. My house is their wild. The best I could do would be to release one in someone else's house, the neighbors' perhaps. But no - they have a cat. What to do?

This is all premature. The mouse is, as yet, at liberty in his preferred habitat.

afmæli

2009-09-11T21:35:00.000-07:00

Not near so terrible a chasm as the one through which Jökulsá crashes over Dettifoss, though holding no less mighty a flood. On a clear day, you could lean out over the water and look left and south and just see them. On that day, you could see the smoke.

kviðmágar

2009-09-10T17:33:00.001-07:00

Það er hræðilegt orð.
Nei, það er stórskemmtilegt orð!
Nei, það er hræðilegt. Karlmaður sem notar slíkt orð er hræðilegur.
Vísst er karlmenn sem nota það karlrembur og algörir skíthælir, en orðið sjálft er með þeim skemmtilegstu í málinu.
...

Kviðmágur is a terribly clever word if you like that sort of thing. It is a way of referring in a comradely way to those who have lain with the same woman you have, as if they were, by the mere act of doing so, comrades. I like that sort of thing if what you mean by that sort of thing is clever words, but that is not what I mean. It is a word for men who, unable to feel real affinity with women, do all they can to claim kinship with each other -- and they can have it, for I claim no kinship with them.

But how much kinship can I deny having with those many others who love what I love? So many have loved the North, and so many of them have been hateful. Even W. H. Auden, who laughed at the Nazis abroad in their mythologized Eisland, at home wrote of seams of lead vanishing down into the Jew Limestone. One shouldn't take offense: that is just what it is called, like the Whin Sill Limestone, the Tynebottom Limestone, and the rest -- all of them merely names. But kviðmágur is just a word, too, and (you might say) there is no other way to call that relation.

Oh, but, still ... shouldn't a poet be able to come up with something?

7.3

2009-09-03T20:19:00.000-07:00

Most of these were new to me:

septichord
septifarious
septifluous
septifronted
septimestre
septimontial
septipedal
septiregal
septizone

7.2

2009-09-02T06:25:00.000-07:00

Septectomy is a resection of the nasal septum, but it sounds like a procedure to remove a seven. The question remains as to why such an operation might be required. Is the goal to be left with sixes alone?

sept.

2009-09-01T20:22:00.000-07:00

Seas, champions, stars, sisters, wonders, sleepers, leagues, hills, heavens, years. Sons, too, but one never hears about sons one through six.

á ferðinni

2009-08-23T18:59:00.001-07:00

Three coins gets you three minutes of machine-pumped air. A little sign says so, both in English and Spanish. For the spent metal tube of testosterone creme lying in the grass above the curb there is no explanation forthcoming.

próförk

2009-08-01T04:06:00.000-07:00

rafkast
uppkast
flogakast
afköst

vitjun

2009-07-30T04:19:00.000-07:00

Dreams dream you, here, and there is nothing you can do about it. Don't fight it. You'll wake up in the dark (as much as there is summer dark here, and there is not much) or in the day. If you wake in between, you might catch the sky still blushing a little too.

spottinn

2009-07-22T05:48:00.000-07:00

Salve et vale!

Slingshot around the horn, around the barren beaches under the glacier, around the long end of the pond where the angry terns dive, and gone again. That stake is well driven down into the rock, though. The rope creaks, but the knot holds to the ring (could it be otherwise?), the ring squeaks on the pivot, and the line will sweep back.

Vale et salve!

wagtail

2009-07-20T09:27:00.000-07:00

A waghalter was a gallows bird, but the bird called wagtail has nothing to do with the noose. Here she is maríuerla. Erla is a bird name and always has been (though now it is a woman's name too, like lóa). The cognate in German means heron. Why she also has the name of the Virgin is anyone's guess, the little flirt.

á flakki

2009-07-15T12:18:00.000-07:00

Nú renna öll vötn í Gígjukvísl. Vertu blessuð, Skeiðará.

vugguvísa

2009-07-13T03:14:00.000-07:00

They bear them out of their sleeping places and lay them down in cradles. They lie on their backs with the skin against carefully arranged gray foam. We wake them gently, open them, peer down into their faces and try to read their expressions. Sleepy and generous, they let us turn their pages without complaint.

snemma á fætur

2009-07-10T04:14:00.000-07:00

I have to admire the skógarþröstur I passed this morning on my way to work. He held a truly impressive collection of worms in his (her?) beak. He eyed me with a look of accomplishment from the hedge before going on his way.

I was coming in later than usual (though not shockingly so) after a later-than-usual night among musicians at a pub, tapping my foot to a beat that sent the pint glasses marching inexorably over the table edges. I don't regret it. But I see today that it pays to rise early with a proverb already in mind.

helst í fréttunum er

2009-07-09T03:27:00.000-07:00

Noon news comes on, not only in the break room but in offices lining the hall. On my way to the coatroom I see the inhabitants hunched over by their radios. What latest financial catastrophe has taken place? It looks like every movie about the London Blitz I've ever seen. After a raid, everyone by their radios: Where did the bombs fall? Is Camden Town still standing? Do you know someone there, or did you?

The headlines in the daily paper are the same. In the spaces afforded by the pictures, someone has frantically scribbled some figures, trying to grasp the extent of the damage.

dul

2009-07-08T13:36:00.000-07:00

grímumaðr
kuflmaðr
komumaðr
huldumaðr

draumalandið

2009-07-07T02:40:00.000-07:00

Mig dreymir þá, ljósa og silkirómaða.

27 + 36 = 22

2009-07-05T03:41:00.000-07:00

Mikið afskaplega er það gaman.

" ... close your eyes, clear your heart ... "

Mikið afskaplega er ég vonlaus í því.

Rrrrreyndu að fylgja - !

Hann brosir alla vega, og við hlæjum. Kannski ef ég tel - einn, tveir - en þar fór það. Byrjum upp á nýtt, þá.

" ... and it's really not okay, no it's really not okay ... "

Kryssa ... kryssa!

Neibbs.

blekfuglar

2009-07-04T06:22:00.000-07:00

Shifting from Times New Roman to Palatino Linotype (for which I bear great affection), all my ǫ's vanish and in their stead appear hundreds of curious-looking black birds. They are almost too sweet to get rid of. Maybe if I shoo them away they will perch on the desk lamp instead.

CaCO3

2009-06-30T10:19:00.000-07:00

Probably calcite. Probably in basalt that's been cooked green under the earth. Probably that.

These are tiny crystals. They barely pick up the light, never mind bend it double. In a large piece, one ray reaches your eye later than the other. Not that you'd notice that. You only know that you're seeing a double image. But one image is further back in time than the other.

When were you last on this beach? Was the air so still like this? You think you remember wind. There was always wind then. It tossed your hair; it tossed his. Black and straw; hraun and shell sand. Probably that's how it was, yes.

kaffitár

2009-06-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

Black instant coffee. In this case, decaffeinated. Not particularly good. It never is. But it reminds you, inevitably, of that little jester of a painter. He was always ready with a plastic kettle and mugs from Ikea (say it: eee-KAY-ah, and get the tones right) and a couple of teaspoons from out the economy-sized plastic jug of the stuff. Stir it up. Did he take milk? I think so. I am sad not to remember. It would be appropriate. Mix in the white to the pigment, give it some body and opacity.

þunn

2009-06-28T09:09:00.000-07:00

It's not a drumhead-tight feeling, taut hide pulled thin over the frame. Þynkan is to do with thinness, I think. I sympathize with the notion but do not recognize it. For me it might rather be the cords under the drum, the snare. It gets wrapped around my feet and I go down in a heap.

tímavél

2009-06-27T12:10:00.000-07:00

Smell is the most powerful memory trigger, they say:

handsoap from Euroshop
Früctis balsam
instant mashed potatoes
moist laundry
curry, curry, curry

sæúlfur

2009-06-25T03:58:00.000-07:00

Did I tell you about the steinbítr? I didn't, did I. Wolffish. Seacat. Anarhichas lupus. Scarborough Woof.

I found the dessicated head of a steinbítur among the corpse-whelks and weed on an olivine and pyroxene beach. There are always interesting things in the weed. What did Sappho say? If you are squeamish, don't poke the beach rubble. Something like that. Once I found the perfect skull of a seabird. I set in on my balcony to dry, but the wind took it away. Even a dead bird flies here.

I carried the head back down the beach. The bergfræðingur, patient with questions, points to its grim teeth. Here and here, for picking its food from the bottom. Here, to crush the shells of mollusks, bolt them whole.