Cruising the Fjord
Atop the water over numerous wooden
Centimeters of a little V-shaped keel
I float east above
The bottom of a deep and V-shaped Sognefjord;
I float east below
The spot where mountains north and south
Of me go up
To finish at Norwegian sky.
The fjord is twice as deep as she appears:
Half above is air,
Perhaps for birds;
Half below me
Flooding North Sea in and out,
Perhaps for fish and eels --
Both meeting here,
Where I at boundary air
Meet the water cruising.
Above me, all is clear
And easy to understand,
To stand under,
To see, or at least to look,
Even as the rain falls
To mist the meadows and to feed the falls
That stack the deep just slightly.
Below, nothing seems visible at all,
Nothing transparent, nothing conceivable --
Only downward thoughts into unpersonable depths
More ominous to me
Perhaps for gray-green, viscous, moist matter
Through which I cannot see --
In beneath, and through which
I could never breathe to be
But only could imagine
A plunging
A sinking slowly
A dead dropping...
And so it is with fear and worship,
With daring ingenuity,
That I drop one Kroner piece made of mannish metal
Overboard
To let it settle and scout through the viscous void,
To let it waltz from side to side,
Slipping from quick view
Within the space of seconds --
And my imagination follows it
With dread and wonder,
With murderous rage, joyful malice,
And with regret that I cannot safely go along
(Neither in a body healthy
Nor in a mind at peace)
Down to its far-flung unreachability
Now lower,
Now behind us
(For we move on)
Still falling,
Still sinking away
As we float forward,
Dropping through that sturdy matter,
Sturdier than the air around me,
Sturdier and more ancient than my body,
Perhaps more circular than my soul,
Moving to measured currents and tides
That proxy-dropped Kroner will strike sometime--
Or rather gently rest -- on mossy, muddy
Darkened, scoured granite floor of fjord
Momentarily
And then move on as well it must –
For now my little boat has rounded an island
(A bottom-dwelling mystery thrust up to view)
In the middle of my journey's reach.
Without sensing it,
Without a way of knowing that we've turned,
I'm heading home already,
Unmeasuringly over and past
That coin of Kroner sinking still,
Past waterfalls with rapids never seen before,
And under a bridge with civil human traffic...
Rounding the coastal bend
Back to the harbor at Bergen,
Since halfway through that day
Will come the night,
And then I sleep.
-RdH