Ólafsfjörður, Iceland
Anywhere you went in town, you could see the white houses of Kleifar
shining on the western slope of the fjord. I was staying at Lísthus
with three painters and a weaver in a single-story house that,
in the herring boom, was a popular café. The herring were long gone,
but the linoleum surfaces lived on as floor tiles in the living room,
as counters in the dim, two-sink bathroom we all shared,
and none of us cleaned. Sometimes, we’d watch movies
on a pull-down screen that was always outcompeted by the daylight.
I’d talk to Claire who’d sit weaving by the lone stationary bike,
or do bootleg yoga with Yen Peng in the empty gallery. Most days,
I’d go alone to stare at the sea and the snow-lined peaks that shifted
when the light swept back, unspooling views the shadow-tongued fjords
concealed in bands of blue, dark blue, whale blue, like the humpbacks
locals say would sing as they circled through the krill-laden shallows
of the last, least-damaged soundscape. Some days I’d brave the beach
where the arctic terns decamped from transmigrating lives of air:
black caps, red beaks—I’d watch them preen and shriek, striking gray wings,
electric as lightning on the dunes—or I’d run past the black-sand beach
along the road, winding around melting snowbanks that streamed unsteadily
down the steep slope back to the sea, and I’d end up in Kleifar.
Nobody lives there now except in summer, but someone tends the sheep
that graze the yards—one sauntered up to the fence line,
lifting its face towards me as if I were someone who knew what to say,
what to do, but I had lost all sense of poetry, the why and wherefore
of who I am or want to be, except a human wandering.