strengleikar aftur

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

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

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

sá beinlausi

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

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

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

Well-starred.

rime

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

loðinn

plastpoki

sneið

fyrir horn

efst

heimamaður

whorl

þræða

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

áframhjáhald
þolinmæðulegur
tölvuskjálfandi
reiðihjól
miskunnulegt

nefna

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

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

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-

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

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

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.