í garðinum

So much for trickle-down economics. This is still beautiful, though.

sturlungaöldin

• mótmæli
• piparúði
• táragas
• óeirðalögregla
• stjórnuslit

None of these words appear in Króksfjarðarbók or Reykjarfjarðarbók. I feel comfortable claiming that outright, without consulting the manuscripts. Perhaps mótmæli - protest - but I doubt it.

breytingar

í aðsigu
í uppsiglingu
á seyði
á uppleið
á hlaupum

*staraz

Common starling -- very common, plenty more where it came from, and those plenty more left this one behind when they boiled back up into the air as a black cloud and disappeared two days ago. He must have fallen into a vent and down the disused heating shaft. I can hear him fluttering on the other side of the tin plates screwed into the plaster.

Two days trying to figure out how to get to him. I peer into the wall with a light but see nothing, hear only feathers against masonry. Then this morning he flies out of the hole and into the bright glass window. I catch him when he lands on the only green thing in the room.

With my hand over his back and my fingers curled over his wings, I felt his heart speed into triple time and my own stop for a moment: Open beak. Black tongue. Glossy eye. Curved claw. Clenched foot. He will not release his grip on the stem. When I snip the leaf from the plant, he holds it just as tightly as before: Gray skin. Black eye. Get a window open.

He lets go when I do.

jurtatal

feverfew
horehound
cocklebur
dandelion

aptanblöðin

The evening papers:

Geese fly into the engines and a plane goes down in the Hudson River. All 155 aboard survive. (Somewhere, birds are making their own tally.) The aircraft is barely afloat now. They've nosed it down the river with boats and bound it against the promenade below Chambers Street. In the photographs it looks like an aluminum leviathan roped against a whaler's bow.

In Hafnarfjörður, a man calls the police for help in evicting a tomcat (not his own) from his apartment. The police refuse to send a unit, and the man is forced to carry out a citizen's arrest and take the apprehendee to the station on his own. The cat is released from custody soon afterwards. Inquiries reveal that the Hafnfirðingur does own another cat, a female, and this sheds considerable light on the actions of the habitually visiting tom.

hitt í fyrra

That was summer, then.

til eru fræ

stara

Thousands of starlings. Fat and fluffy (or pretending to be), they are in every tree and on every branch outside my window. The closest ones press their chins down into their breasts, looking satisfied or grumpy. But, oh, the chatter in the other ones! If just a high and bouncing sound can be cacophonous, then this one is. I like it, though. I tap at the keyboard and they chirp on the twigs.

(Who knew mynas were also starlings, also Sturnidae? I had had no idea. People listen more attentively to them than to common starlings, but, then, people like to hear themselves talk. )

And -- stillness! I turn my head and catch only the last fifty or so as they vanish over the roofs in silence.

uglur

Wet November forest -- warmer than many a northern summertime meadow. Pine, fir. Spongy ground under blankets of needles. Genuinely pitchy dark under the branches, but overhead a sky of charcoal. A moon, once or twice, when there were no clouds.

But moon or not, every night there were owl voices in the trees across the clearing. I heard them when, waking well after midnight to a primal need, I ventured out and padded a little ways off. I never saw them, and they never paused in their conversation as I went by or went back. Every night in the forest I was a small child again, waking to a full bladder and creeping down the stairs long after bedtime, slipping past the lit doorway through which after-dinner grown-up conversation poured.

bøygen

• bezel
• úlfur
• cabochon
• meniscus
• corona
• glassúr
• rime
• hjásól
• halo