Diary of Iceland

For no reason in particular, I am taking this opportunity to republish a poem I wrote 18 years ago, after a weekend visit to Iceland.

Friday, 7:00 am – Keflavik
Rain
That speaks of cold
Boldly glistens on the tarmac
Whispers welcome strangely warm
Forms an ever-changing pattern
In the closeness of the sky.
Welcome to Iceland
Welcome to the barren straightway
Road that runs from gateway to the island’s only city.
We’ve framed it just for you –
On the left we poured an ocean’s bay
Gleaming silver in the half-suggested light of day.
On the right we laid a strip of… desolation…
At least that’s what you’d say.
You would call that desolation, that proudly can
Sustain an Iceland pony’s meagre hay.
But never mind, you’re new to us
You’ve yet to learn what lushness means to us.
For now, welcome to Iceland.


Friday, 9:51 am – Nyardvik
Three short days!
So much to see,
So much wild country
To pass in such a hurried haze
These three short days
Of childish energy!
My legs are itching for a walk
That press instead the pedals of my rented car.
Drive me into lands afar!
Where I’ll alight in sight of all I seek:
Peace and glee
And golden fleece
And above all else:
Mystery.

Friday 10:22 am – Hveragerdi

Are you so very jet-lagged?
You for whom we’ve made the welcome true
And hewn a mountain path for you to climb,
To relish in the dew, like rime,
That clings to volcanic rocks and windscreens.
Must you really rest?
Surely no night’s sleep compares
To what you now behold, Iceland’s
Greenest pastures nestled in a valley.
Come, come,
I’ll make a bakery appear, just here on the right,
Neat and clean, with cafe seating and a toilet.
Have a doughnut and a Danish and a coffee strong as spit,
Maybe you should read a bit
Your book about the Iceland farmer who never quit.
Rise up now, like Bjartur,
You have not yet seen my best.
I promise much will happen ‘ere you rest.


Friday 11:30 am – Geysir
That is not the Earth;
Those proud bare scrags
Jagged hilltops breaking where the valleys start.
That is not the Earth;
The road that winds between the Autumn grasses,
Their pastures torn apart.
Nor is the Earth
That ocean far behind me,
Whose salty waves and brine,
Like wrapping paper coat the world
In all things maritime.
THIS is the Earth:
A bubbling cauldron from the depths of Hell,
That tells of molten fire beating like a heart.
See it spew a spray of boiling mist! (We gasp)
The slightest spasm of its burning core, nothing more.
It cares not if the tourists’ cameras click with curiosity
Or if they step withing the water’s reach
And screech in burning agony.
Indifferent too, the bubbling pool of blue-green jewel,
Odour warm with sulphur,
That asks in gurgles random,
How deep am I?
I cannot fathom.
But one thing now I know is clear,
Mother Nature is no fair flower of the spring.
She is a core of liquid rock,
And where her outstretched finger stirs the top, the air
It’s there you’ll find a place called ‘Geysir’.

Friday 12:40 pm – Gullfloss
Superstition’s what they call it,
Viking tales and sagas old
That tell of faeries, elves and trolls.
Now you see the mighty Gullfloss Falls
Where crystal water pounds the rock
To sheets of rising mist and mystery.
This is Iceland’s history.
And look! You see that profile
Carved into the cliffside?
See the gaping mouth and eyeless sockets
Seething wild with power
That pitiless a Viking child devour?
Now turn your glance
To where a vapour lifts its spray
See that in the shifting mist exists
A host of dancing creatures, Elves.
That freed, at last exult themselves
In one fast flight to heaven.
They call it Superstition
These so-called men of science
And come with words in Latin
To rob us of our Nordic right;
They who’ve not spent a single moonlit night
In wary sight of dancing faeries and the Gullfloss Troll
Have stole our legend, thieved our vision
And given us instead their Superstition.

Friday 4:00 pm – Route T3
Desolation
The desert speaks in tones of eerie silence.
No trolls live here, I hope
And hope my rented Opel holds together
Along this fading track –
I could turn back –
But oh! what a view.
The untamed mountains, wild beyond nature,
Upon which is perched a Glacier
See, it bursts into the valley
Then issues forth a lake of nearly frozen pureness.
Stop. This hut atop the hill
Equipped with bunks and filled with Glacial views
Built to use in case of jet-lag.
Here I’ll unfurl my sleeping bag
For today I’ll go no further.

Friday 6:00 pm – Hvitarvatn
They’re coming
At the window panes, the party
Their hearty Nordic frames
They ride on auburn ponies
Iceland’s proudest sons
Gather sheep and sleep in huts like this one.
Did I day ‘sleep’?
Here’s Ole and Ardur and a case of beer and liquor.
Come join us for a drink or eight
There’ll be no sleep at any rate
Until the perfect moon has cast its parting glimmer
On the ice of Langjokull.
We will sing tonight
And dance and eat boiled sheepshead
And will not sleep, but laugh and joke and brag
And you’ll forget there ever was a thing called jet-lag.

Saturday 10:30 am – Route T37

My stomach groans in protest
My temples pound in protest
My rented Opel creaks in protest
As the road grows worse and worse
The price I pay seems high today
But the memory of revelry
Will far outlast these morning-after ailments.
How long ’til Hveravellir is reached?
This eternal path of potholes be damned!
I need some bread, some water and a break.
There. Now I see it, rising geysir steam
A shack or two, the promise of a road improved.
And food.

Saturday 12:00 noon – Hveravellir

Can even dreams perceive this kind of peace?
To lie half-naked in a clear blue pool, a hot spring bath
While silent snowflakes melt against your steaming face
And into snow-capped highlands runs the wandering path.
Iceland’s greatest treasure is its peace, it seems
In such a place we live beyond our dreams.

Saturday 3:00 pm – Blonduos
Receding mountains
Speeding roads
And all at once
The coast explodes,
Fjords of water, fingers now unwind,
That leave the lava desert far behind.
Little village clinging to a shore
A score of houses on an ocean striking
A fishing boat and a pub names Viking
And a guesthouse with a pillow soft as rest,
And as comfortable
As only deep and dreamless sleep can be.

Sunday 10:30 am – Route 1
Soak it in!
The last time I’ll enjoy this weekend spectacle.
The she-troll’s gorge
Volcanoes forged and fading
Their blackened memory pervading
Mocks the grass and flowered greenery
Scarred with rocks and smitten scenery.
Drink it in!
Crystal pure, its gushing source
Where all the water in the world begins
Trickles, falls in fickle sprawls
Ever downward with enduring force.
Now pause to wet my wind-cracked lips
In ample sips
A momentary detour from its everlasting course.
Breathe it in!
What air was always meant to be
Where no debris, nor dust, nor industry
Has sullied these chill gusts
That thrust in heavy gulps upon my lungs
The welcome must of inhalation.
I almost fear to leave you, Iceland,
Though the road cuts south
And straight away along the ocean’s mouth
Into the bay they call ‘Reykyavik’.
Let me stop at one last scenic view
To soak and drink and breathe and plead
That you embue in me a tenth, a hundreth even
Of this perfect paradise.

Monday 3:00 pm – Kalfatjorn
Come out of that tent, you lazy tramp!
Greet your spectral guests
That dance in moonlit circles
Round your makeshift camp.
They are faeries, magic imps
Summoned from the sprigs of heather
Called together from the regions nether
To haunt you in that tent you tethered.
Was I their summoner?
No, not I (though such powers I possess)
Rather, it was a lesser sorceress.
The Celtic witch called Columkill
Who through countless spells’ enchantment
Has earned dominion o’er this hill
And o’er your meagre night’s encampment.
She ordered up this ghostly host
Perhaps because you’re Irish too
To bid farewell to one who came
And knew a place where spirits dwell
In every dell, on every mountain face
Atop the Glacier and along the strand
That forms the paegan soul of Iceland.
We will spend this last night with you
In frenzied revelry aglow
Atop the witch’s hill that frowns
Upon the little coastal towns below.
And when the dawn emerges
Propelling from the Eastern sea the newborn sun
We’ll be dispelled, our magic done.
The day will carry you away from our strange company
And into the sky
And so I whisper now
With half-heard mystery, like a sudden whisp of cloud
My last goodbye.

My review of Katherine Rundell’s ‘Superinfinite: the transformations of John Donne’

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I first met poet John Donne there
Where in the century just gone
Every Irish not yet -man and -woman
Was made to memorise his sonnets:
On the bescribbled pages of Soundings,
That schoolbook English greatest hits
With tea stains on it.

I’ll confess he had on me the same effect
As on those his peer detractors
Who felt his metre to erratic,
His imagery too obtuse
For comfort or for ready use.

But sure, what more my story tell
Than of inner city youth?
In truth, no match for soaring
high-boned biographess
Katherine Rundell,
Whose dashing image squats a third
Of th’ rear cover sleeve in hardback.
(Her verso lips appear in colour lurid,
While Donne’s own recto, a pallid white and black)

What could I know of Souls
Like those that Donne proffered?
I who unlike her was never Fellow
Of All of them in Oxford?
With every syllable she writes she fools
Through heavy weight of accent,
Of chevron and three cinquefoils gules.

Yet ‘tis not her pride the deadly sin
That makes Kate’s lips so bright against the pages dun.
‘Tis ours – a sort of rabble pride,
We buy ‘cause we aspire
To transform two weeks in Croyde
Into something higher
Than pricey meals and a long slow, A-road, trafficked, need to stop and wee at the next station car ride.

She peddles for another sort of pride
As transformation
An inconstant poet fraud
Who sold his faith and stole his bride.
Why this odd fascination?

Because if Donne can use fine words to hide
His sins of greed, and sloth and lust,
So surely can our Kate use this pulpit of a type
To sell her stinking English upper crust
And all the sour history in it
As something more than what it is:
Sub-infinite.

View all my reviews

The Lost Scholar

What happened to his days
Of wasted cafe stays
Coffees nursed and nursed again
‘Til nothing more remained
But stains of foam and a few stray grains?

What happened to his pads of note,
Filled with self-important poems?
Thoughts to which he gave a home.
By hand he wrote those dog-eared tomes,
The most precious things he owned.

What happened to that quick and hungry kid
Who slid through life amid
A thousand storms and strife and grit,
In hopes he’d win his long-shot bid
To rid himself of hunger, the need for speed and grit?

Now with coffee cup and belly full
With notepad empty, feelings dull
He’s left to mull
What happens when a vibrant mind –
Through wine and time –
Becomes a sunken skull.

On the afternoon of my very last exam

16,000 sheets of note
Of statement, prose and quote
Of problems posed, stuffed down my throat.

1,020 books of text
O’er which I pondered and perplexed
Tired, drained, or just plain vexed.

20 years of 3-season blues
Autumn, winter, springtime views
Through classroom windows the world perused;
An idle gaze on days unused.

399 examinations
Stress, study and consternation.
Flashcards, fish and preparation.

Today I’ve sat 400: my very last exam,
and sit and wonder exactly what I am.
No more a student, and yet not more a man.

And though I’ve been deviser
Of 400 separate answer sets
(All more or less correct)
I am no more the wiser,
Nor any greater is my intellect.

They did not teach me how to love
Nor how to live,
How to rise above my petty self,
Nor how to give –
Nor even how to take;
No, not even doing good, for goodness sake.

I leave this final venue as a novice still,
A freshmen only, at the very bottom of my hill.
There are other tests that yet await.
This I know, will be my fate.

And whatever may, upon my final day of Judgement be,
One thing’s sure: the answers won’t be such
As would earn me a degree.

Alliteration is Amazing. Assonance is Fantastic. But Rhyme is Sublime

Twilight Peace

You can’t define a peaceful frame of mind
In terms of states observable.

But if you could, you might try this:
A grassy slope, yourself reclined
A summer crop of people ripened right behind.

On one cheek the heat of evening sunshine
Still burns hard
On the other whips a chill nocturnal breeze –
Night’s vanguard.

You are the evening.
Your face is twilight.
Your nose the border between the Republic of Day
And the Kingdom of Nightfall.

The very air inhaled must show its passport
To move from glaring colour’s bloom
Into the comfort promised to the night’s caccoon.

What is life?

Life is that time you played
What started out as hide-and-seek
Then someone added Nerf guns
Secret bases, boys-vee-girls
And finally a rope swing and a dare
Water so cold it warmed the after-swimming air.
Treats meant to last the week eaten then and there.
Nothing ever tasted so sweet.
No one saw the June sun duck below the trees behind the river line.
Well past supper time!
On legs sore from running you nonetheless peeled
Across the fields
To a half-meant ‘sorry momma’, and a half-cold spaghetti meal.

Life is the buzzing sound
From music played too loud
And the noise of the college crowd.
That lingers still in ears and on your clothes
All down September’s rain-painted side-walk home,
Reminds you of that second pint,
The little smile she bore you
Sideways, mid sentence to her friends,
That might – just might – some future night, blossom into much, much more.

Life is those endless minutes waiting, anticipating
The breaking of the swept and polished order of long-kept
Knick-knacks, unmoved since last They stormed the door;
That in two violent minutes of shedding little coats and mittens triggered
More noise than needles make in all the winter weeks of knitting new ones, one size bigger.
Then They finally appear, you find
Little faces so filled with Now and so in likeness of Their parent-child, standing, smiling just behind,
It calls to mind, every school lunch prepared, every memory shared
and all those times bygone.
This rich reward, this weekend chaos, is the reason why you struggle on.

Life is never ‘staying safe’,
Waiting, clutching to existence,
Until every living risk fades to nothing.

Take me back

Take me back somehow
To when I dreamed I’d have
A better now than now.

Return me in place and mind
To those fledgling times when we were lax and preened,
So small we lodged ourselves between the cracks
Of that and this unchanged machine
In which we now have risen to be full-fledged cogs.

Take me back
To when my back impressed upon the chain-linked wire
Dangled legs all splayed, tired out
From too much tennis played,
And spent this one forgetless hour
Before a shower and off to watch a movie.

Return me even to those since-forgotten fears,
To the stoney months and years
Of want and doubt and grit and scree,
From which Nostalgia – liar that she is –
Pans out her precious golddust memories.

Take me back
And if you say it can’t be done
For pity’s sake,
Give my back the strength to carry on.

Eulogy for a Dungeon Master

I came across this poem that I’d written ten years ago to mark the passing of Gary Gygax – creator of Dungeons & Dragons

Eulogy For A Dungeon Master

Countless the basements
You transformed to caverns;
Nameless the kitchen tables
fabled, formed as tabled taverns
Where a pimply 16 year old
Did his best
to bluff the role
Of rugged half-elf grimly
Assigning the next quest or tale
From o’er the rim
Of a dinted pint of frothy ginger ale.

We saw not the chinks
In our own teen-male armour
Nor did we stop to think
If days of playing roles might harm our
Hold on a real world so much more alarming
Than a hoard of charging orcs.

For in that four foot table space
Of paper, dice and figures made of lead
There thrived a truly magic place
where teenies meek were brave instead.

No slick slew of game designers needed we
No 3-D graphics, LANs or fancy Wiis.
With one hardbound spellbook you made the spark
That filled our teenage years with something more
than boredom and a high school pecking order.

Maybe your DM’s rolled a 20 now
Or just grew up and found
a girl, a job, a better place in whatever
World is real to Him.
And in a box in some cosmic attic
Your long forgotten character sheet
Will fade to dust, crumpled up against
An old SAT study guide.

But know this, Gary Gygax:
In every memory that still persists
In every fighter, cleric, thief or mage
Reborn upon a line-ruled page
A piece of you comes back to life.
And so we say adieu and thanks
Until we meet again as NPCs.