————-——Maeshowe Runes
Blue and then deeper blue. Water and pure wind.
Fields of charcoal and blue-gray shadows as far
as the eye can see. Islands of bald stone rising
to touch the clouds. Cliff walls ascending, seagulls
ascending, skyward and calling out, circling over
the schools of herring and diving again to the sea.
You are here in the black rock. Bound to this breaking
light. Atoms, electrons, freckles and blown hair.
Bound to this ground the way clouds hold peaks,
the way snowfields blend with a midnight star,
the way wind takes shape in the swayback pines,
in the fallen white feathers of birds. I can feel
your stone heart beating inside me. Salmon eye.
Tusk eye. Ocean waves holding the shores.
Rowboats anchored, knocking against the chord.
Rainclouds in long calligraphic swells. Wave
upon wave. Islands without end. A sun that sits
on the Herøyfjord like a burning plate of tin.
A hundred years of all this light, I’ve only heard
your story once. The distance meant to bleach it
clean. Erase the shame of hardtack bread, fish guts
dipped in lye. The midnight sun. The yard of rope
you tied to the rafters to enter the weight of air.
The barn still stands. The tools you used to strip
the fish still hang on the inside wall. The bucket
used to milk the cow. The yellow skins of cod.
I watch the cruise ship carve the blue. Oil rigs
flaring against the snow. The glowing sky alive
with birds. I taste the patch of earth you plowed,
the bed you planted seeds. A single stone against
my tongue. The shadows, then the trees.
Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of Rail (BOA) and has received a Pushcart Prize, MacDowell Fellowship, and Wallace Stegner Fellowship. He lives in San Francisco and is a lecturer at Stanford University.
Photo by Ramon Vloon on Unsplash
