I
Through the ridge-like skin on my back
your fingers sail,
retracing my memories of the NordOstSee kanal.
The bruises on my skin are
leftovers of clams by the high tide,
emtpy cups, broken cups,
the last siren of the lighthouse
before dawn lights up the sky.
You're coming out of the forest.
Out on the open prairies where you
can't get lost any more,
there's no darkness left at all,
but starlight,
and a horizonline aflame with the sun rising and setting at
the edge of the end of the world,
the only one place that could make me return.
II
When I arrived you were there waiting,
watching the primordial waves
turn my life around.
III
We
he said
he could pull down the stars to stop the gravitation of the darkest nights, he
said he could rearrange the world.
(for me)
(He looked up at the moon that night,
a moon that created a path on the water.
He counted the falling stars that we couldn't see,
and told me they were enough to cage in a supernova)
he said
that the winter was about to end.
With his hands on the ground and his eyes for the sky,
he said he could trace the way back home through the ocean,
through the rising mist, in the hour of the wolf.
When I asked him if it would be worth it,
he said he had survived many winters
he looked like iceland,
with those white lips of his,
those white teeth of his,
that white smile.
he felt a bit like iceland, too,
walking on the snow like the last man on earth,
picking on the stray anchovites that gladed past us,
by the shore,
snorting at the constellations.
He was like iceland because he never left footprints and he was so far away,
almost like the last standard of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,
unfathomable, solemn,
circumpolar.
He was like iceland because he left my hands cold, and there was always a folk song whispering around him,
like he never did anything but speak in ancestral riddles.
But he looked the most like Icela
alternative title: in the past, or
in a mirror world,
I am the southernmost island before the ice,
you are tundra.
I am a hollow loch that is gone with the high tide.
You are the frozen forest,
swarming with hungry wolves that tear
fissures open in your pinmould scalp.
I am the last lighthouse at the edge of the world,
remote,
perennial.
In this world without summer, I pervade the whitecaps.
You are different.
Adorned by the frailty of the underwoods,
you are scenic,
recombusting,
in an endless process of death and rebirth.
You know snow. You claim to have lived through many seasons.
I am simplicity-
the bare rock,
the drifting iceberg,
though the ridge-like scars on your back,
my fingers sail,
an image of the NordOstSee Kanal.
The islands off your coasts are
like lumps of cream in Norwegian coffee,
like icicles;
but you'd bleed green the color of
birch sap.
I know my eyelids are errant albatross, fluttering around in the stormy sky,
and even if your eyes are spring,
behind them are burnt many winters.
The moon is waxing.
There is no ferry to bring me back now,
and I sit on your dragon sands and watch the shreds of the sunset.
All of my bones are exposed in the low tide,
a staircase down to
my memories of broken shells.
Long time ago my shores were littered with dead f