#1997 - let's play foxes and lambs

 

1997

6.171

20.vi.25

let’s play foxes and lambs

short history of Reykjavik

 

 

before time settled over this, not even a name to know

yet we’ll presume a spirited presence

call what you will

 

six thousand and seventy three years from the world’s beginning

 

smoky bay

 

thwart fixed to gunwale

 

and where the high seat washed ashore

step a little inland, brackish

 

squat turf mossed for a hat

bones in the turf wall warding off

 

even the sea looks like a ship

 

indoors choking, soaked and frozen

 

milked at the shielings

 

an ell of tabby, an ell of serge

twill dyed

glass bead, bone pin, a wick of grass

 

one tusk = three cows

is how they were hunted out of the world

 

later will be the chimney village

 

colourful plague of deathflies forebodes

 

here in the vanishing (much misted)

piratic

 

there will be a butter house

gossip streets

weight of words to choke down

 

potatoes in throat

everyone comes and goes

 

under the tephra too

exacting

 

one plague, another, haze famine, years’ dark

 

how many times was it almost died out?

 

still sit up on your own grave for a laugh

 

we only know what is says in the book

we used the book for a sieve

 

who’s listening?

 

you see how far this is?

 

so much as they were

we are now

so much as they are

we’ll be

 

carry me out to the sun, won’t you now

I’ll see the last day’s last light