Trees branch across land, sea and sky here in the northern fall as you walk leaves floating in front of your face and those already at your feet; all that crumples, all that pushes upward.
Lakes rustle in northern light trying to stretch and warp; roots and trunks bending like a bow.
Indefinite set theories parade round boulders carved and clawed out of earth when ice cracked and fractured; rippling clockwise under Cassiopeia and Draco, arcing like islands straight into the sea.
Small boats cast up against wrinkled bark; hollow and ribs you might turn over and sail the forest.
Thin, white clouds float on blue which the sky reflects back to bare branches and pine needles worrying glass.
Mallard promenade.
Queen of the Sidhe.
Always the sea wrapping round foliating rock, while thin, black arms run green fingers through a wolf’s grey-white underbelly.
Brittle air ages cell and cork into daguerreotypes left in sideboard drawers, waiting on the wintering ahead.
The bronchial tree breathing in and out chestnut and cocoa brown, goldenrod and pear.
And the station. And wet, black boughs.
Spin round and round, then stop and watch clouds and fog banks, robin egg blue and blue-grey jostle, laugh, not knowing up from down; branches and roots exchanging places–the sky cellared for another season.
Table-edges soften, milk pales in cups, mirrors in the bathroom steam, hiding what they know about you.
Next morning you wake to a first dusting of ice crystals and the micrography of snowflakes.
Our lake slips one arm then two into its coat, wraps a wool scarf round, and walks its shoreline reading letters in the snow.
While the ice stares back at you, asking the same questions you riddle with your lover in bed as the night slips ropes, waves a wing to the harbor, and sails the forest.
Postscript: Don’t forget the glögg after a walk through the Svecofennian orogeny. Bon Appétit!
Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones 