milli trjánna

The road slops to the right and the orange moon skids into view between the trees, low and huge. It's at half, tipping on its bulge. I am afraid it will spill and fall into the pines. It is something to do with its being so low, the way a full teacup high on a bookshelf inspires fearful expectation, even though the cup would be no steadier on the floor than high up, and the moon is no more precarious for swinging where it does tonight.

framundan

I'm looking for maps. I don't find any.

Someone once laughed at me for wanting a driving map. "There's only one road! It goes around." There was nothing else to say; circumnavigation is the only option past Djúpavogur, Höfn, Skaftafell, Kirkjubæjarklaustur.

Now I'm headed for an even smaller land of cod, where there is only one road and not even a ring. It spirals out, it spirals in, and that is all -- past names always in the same sequence. Driving past sand and scrub you are a train passing through stations of memory.

sæhestur

They haven't yet found the owner of the horse that came ashore in Straumfjörður á Mýrum. He is unshod, which does not surprise me at all. He is, of course, a gray. Such horses always are.














"Sæhestur nemur land í Straumfirði." Skessuhorn, 21. júní 2007

ljós

Here there are fireflies in the warm dark. If I think about it, know that I believe it is in the nature of warm dark to have fireflies in it. It's a belief from childhood.

Somewhere else the dark is cold -- some of it air and some of it water -- and broken only by a few bright points, barely a line: the fishing boats out at sea.

skóggengin

She has been sleeping in the forest. It has been almost a year since she came out here and bedded down. The forest is very beautiful, but mostly her eyes are shut and she is dreaming something else, somewhere else. Now and then she drifts back here. When she comes awake -- just before she comes awake -- she moves her hand (it moves itself) to make sure it is still there. It always is. Then before too long she drifts off again.

sumra

Summer is back like an uncle you haven't seen since you were a kid. He's just the same. His forearms are thick; you used to wonder at the ropey muscles moving under the skin. There are black hairs on his arms and on the back of his neck that run into the collar of his shirt. Whether he is tanned from the sun or just swarthy you were never sure.

The sun has gone down finally, and you're both sitting on the porch steps. You can see fireflies in the next yard. He is telling a story you heard him tell when you were little. There's a rasp in his voice like a staticky radio; when he laughs it's the crack of the bat.

hindfell

Ravish (Oxford tells us) has the following senses:

1 seize and carry off by force.
2 rape.
3 fill with intense delight; enrapture.

The word has not be carried far from the meanings of its root:

O.Fr. raviss-, prp. stem of ravir "to seize, take away hastily"
Reconstructed Vulgar Latin *rapire, from
L. rapere "to seize, hurry away"

Enchantment and a sort of rapture is no later than 1430; rape comes shortly after in 1436.

I hadn't known that Wotan's intended curse on Brünhilde was so brutal. Her magical sleep could have been broken by any common villain. She is to lie unprotected on the rock, a slave in waiting, any man's abject wife to be. Only after she begs on her knees does he relent and raise the flames around her stoney bed. To think that he is her father.

I give in after Die Walküre. My own Act IV comes the next night when a dream bears down on me. I did not see his face.