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Vel kveðið, finnst henni enn. En kvæðin er leyfi útásandafarna ástarsambands. Textinn fangir raunverulegt augnablik: hún var ekki viss um hvað hún sæi, hvað henni fyndist. Hún bjó í svo miklum vonum, samt. Vildi svo geta treyst tilfinningunum.

En hún reyndi ekki skyggn, ekki sjáandi, heldur blind.

Nú sér hún.

fjarvera

She hasn't been here. Why hasn't she been here? I'm not certain.

She's seen sad things: a squirrel, unaware his hindquarters have been crushed flat by a tire, goes about his business gathering nuts and climbing trees. He is so light that he can do this with only the use of his forelimbs, not weighed down by knowledge of his certain death from sepsis, kidney failure, the obvious. Extraordinary, ordinary animal. Then again, his spine was probably severed: he feels nothing. He isn't there the next day.

This is not the reason. I do not know the reason.

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.

fíflast

Foolish with laughter and merrier than she has been in full tumbler of years, finnur hún á sér ferfalt skot. Fourfold infatuation is a solid four shots down the gullet: brennivín, Tópas, Opal, og svo aftur brennivín. Skemmtilegt. Movie dialogue wafts through her head: "You fool! Never mix your drinks!" Tja. The mix of languages alone makes the fjallahringur spin around her like badly warped vinyl, and the northern summer will make a fool of her every time, regardless.

Þú ert að flissa, segir ársins holdgervingur Fróns lágum rómi. Vertu góður drengur og haltu kjafti, segir hún. (Fokk, segir hún líka.) Ég skal ekki segja neinum, segir hann. Gott, segir hún, ströng á svip. En hún heldur ekki út og flissar eins og fífl.

bless

Maybe she really had been in love all that time. It felt a lot like it. She had smiled to herself thinking of his face, thought about how his footsteps would sound on her wooden floors, fantasized about his being there when she woke up, imagined touching him. Silly love, the kind she had never before permitted herself. She'd only ever seen him once, after all, and he hadn't taken much notice of her. Silly love, and silly heartbreak, and in the end it will be all right.

staðreynd

She keeps her heart between the pages of an etymological dictionary.

sængja

This Sunday morning she slept deeply but lightly, a few feet above the mattress, buoyed by the early-morning visions tangled in the coverlet alongside her legs.

takk fyrir síðast

Last year she was driving, passing crows and barking dogs. The sun set and nameless planets turned overhead. All things were lonely -- lonelier, in fact, because not entirely alone. Shadowy canine forms kept pace with the car long after the sound of barking ceased. Every few miles the headlights skimming the gravel shoulder would catch something: a little still clump of feathers, maybe. Dim figures flashed by at the side of the road, beyond the sweep of light. Hitchhikers? Ghosts?

She stayed awake at the wheel, but dreams came to her anyway. The air above seemed as black as coal still in the mine and as heavy. The pedal under her steady foot felt like the pedal of a bellows; she could force air over the tiny fire by pressing down through resistance as satisfying as the firmness of fruit under a good knife, the taut skin of a berry between your teeth. She drove on like this until she got where she had been going, lay down there to sleep, dreamed herself below the sea with her hair in the cold current. Later she woke, achy and new-aware of the strangeness of everything.

And then it was autumn.

nøkk

There it is, by the side of the brook. It's been a long time since she has seen it, here or anywhere. It's he, actually. He used to be here almost every day, cropping the grass. The water would reflect the sunlight onto his belly, dappling it even more. It is happening now. She watches him.

She used to cluck to him and ease her way in his direction with her hand outstretched. Sometimes he would ignore her. Sometimes he would lever his neck towards her and investigate the palm of her hand with his mouth. She was always keenly aware of his great, flat teeth just behind the moist white fuzz on his black lips. He never bit. Sometimes he spooked -- at what, she was never sure -- splashed away over the stream and vanished for days.

Today it is hot. The sunlight buzzes. A cloud of gnats expands and contracts in the air between them. He flicks his tail. She doesn't move at all. Slowly, then, she begins towards him through the grass. He picks up his head suddenly, and she thinks he is about to bolt. He only stands with his ears pointing at her. A few steps more, and she can put her hand on the side of his neck. He tosses his mane and bumps her arm with the side of his head. She runs her hand along him as she steps past, and then she skips, grabs the base of his mane, swings herself up, and holds on as he leaps away, hooves splashing.

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.

persónur

She likes being able to write in the third person. It allows a bit of distance. Sometimes she wishes the grammar were even more spacious. There are other things she might write if she were able to use fourth person, fifth person, sixth person.

Today she saw a robin bouncing along the pavement and then standing suddenly straight up. Also chalk on the sidewalk and honeysuckle in a tree, but that is all she can say.

biðsalur

She looks for him there anyway.

kemur

At night she lies on her back to wait for sleep. She rests the knobs of her thumb joints beside the points of her hips and lets the backs of her arms sink against the bed. The cords of her neck slacken; her legs fall gently open. Her breath deepens and slows.

When sleep comes he comes up from the foot of the bed. He pauses a moment to look at her face before he slides up over her and lowers his weight onto her body.

að láni

She's having someone else's spring evening in the car, rolling down the main drag playing Geislavirkir, loud, with the windows rolled down, singing along with Bubbi and hoping that the people on the sidewalk can hear it, can hear her having someone else's spring evening in the car.

She's thinking that when it gets hot, she'll borrow still someone else's summer evening. She'll get in the car and not go anywhere at all, just sit in the coolness of the air conditioning and listen to the game on the radio.

She always feels a little sheepish borrowing these things, almost as if she were worried that she'd be caught. But she doesn't feel too badly. It never seems like anyone has used them any time recently, and she always puts them back where she found them.

edgewise

If she is quick, quick, she can get a word in:


... the cud of memory
so literally familiar:
crushing the past in her teeth
again and again
and never swallowing
allayed for once, arbitration
of the feud placated,
en þú kunnir aldregi
bera tilt með tveim
imagining those under the hill
Dimmur er hesin dapri dagur
niður í mold at fara.

disposed like Gunnar
who lay beautiful
inside his burial mound,
though dead by violence
hræðist þá ekki frægðarhetjan góða
óvinafjöld, þó hörðum dauða hóti:
daring has never wanted

and unavenged.
Men said that he was chanting
verses about honor
just now she mis-typed:
anger for honor
and that four lights burned

in corners of the chamber:
which opened then, as he turned
Gunnar horfir hlíðarbrekku móti,
with a joyful face
to look at the moon.
and she imagines his face
full of silver mercy
Dimmur er hesin dapri dagur
niður í mold at fara.

(Begging pardon of Seamus Heaney, scion of the poetic dynasty in service of the North, and Jónas Hallgrímsson.)


Before he turned to the moon, he turned towards home; it had seemed to him too beautiful to leave. Of course it would pull so. The fading age tugged at him, the age of honor, not pettiness but the natural nobility of behaving well. Maybe he stayed as much for love of his princehood as for love of home. He stayed at home in a past he could never survive instead of pushing off with the tide, pointing the prow out and away.

She has been too long under the earth, coiled jealous on her honor like the dragon on its gold. Hún fýsist í brott, hún fýsist út, she would leap into the dark and looping pull of the moon.

hamur

It itches and crawls. Tonight she wants to peel her skin off and hang it on a hook, drape it over the back of a chair, fold it on top of the laundry pile. Any of these things. Would she float about like a mist without her skin or flow shapeless onto the floor? She isn't sure.

She wants to shuck it off like a salt-encrusted boot.

straumur

The gas furnace thrums away in the basement. The front room never gets warm. Cold air spills in over the threshhold even when the door is shut and bolted. Walking through it is like stepping into a puddle on the street.

She makes tea and crosses the floor, thinking of socks or Sir Walter Raleigh, turns to go up the stairs. The ceiling is low here, slanting up to the second floor, and already on the first step she feels the warm air flowing upwards along it. It moves past her head, just stirs her hair.

She thinks waterfall, millrace, wonders what invisible things ride the current to the upper floor --or else swim against the current, fighting their way downstairs to their ancient spawning grounds on the kitchen ceiling.

leggja á

Grettir Ásmundarson vs. Glámr. The famous scene in the moonlight, the wrestling match, the grim tug of war in the gap of the door. The black and bloated revenant pulls with his feet braced against the frame. Grettir does the same. Glámr pulls outwards; Grettir pulls inwards. They are equally matched, and Grettir can feel it. He cannot break Glám's grasp and he cannot pull him into the house. So he lets his feet slip, and Glámr tumbles backwards onto the turf with Grettir on top of him.

It is a clever move, and Grettir does defeat Glámr and behead him, but he never gets free of the curse Glámr lays on him during the fight: eternal outlawry, solitude, terror of the dark.

She is photocopying the passage for a class. She hasn't opened this edition in several years. The cardboard cover flaps away from the title page. A bit of paper is stuck to the flyleaf, a note:

I'm going home. Call me after the meeting--!

and a little scribble of a name.

She feels a little tug. Then she lets go of the book and it falls back onto the desk.

vetrarástin

She does not have summer flings; she has winter love affairs. Their colors are rich, not so bleached-out. They are less dry and dusty. Winter can have its own dryness, but if her hands crack from cold, a winter lover will rub them with white butter and beeswax. A winter romance smells of snow, fire in the grate, batter becoming cakes. This winter her romance is with the color of blackberries baked into a soft yellow crumb, luxuriously purple and mauve.

könnur

She bought a silver pitcher. It stands on little four-toed feet. It matches the coffee pot, or nearly so. (The coffee pot has only curls of foliage in place of toes.) They both have round, swooping shapes, streamlined, bottom-heaved and beaked. They have a pleasing physicality in the way that ducks do. They are not egret-elegant. But silver duck-pitcher and silver duck-coffee pot are oblivious to such æsthetic concerns. They stand perfectly unruffled and practical, their spouts pointing off towards the back of the dining room.