1.  In this heat, I fill an old, white basin for the sparrows;
    the work of two minutes offers them a sweet, cold lake, 
    agua dulce y frio,
    and they fill the yard with the splash and chatter 
    of women doing laundry. I cannot tell you
    how their joy brings continents to calve inside me,
    my veins to run with salmon and blue water 

2.  On the old porch, under swinging strands of light, 
    you sang with the strength of seven men, a song that could lift a house
    and carry it across the ice,
    a voice calling souls back from the dead. I could not say
    that each time your hand thumped the guitar’s body,
    my own skin pinkened and rose like the sea at dawn. 
    I could not tell you that your mercurial song of smoke and honey
    wrote itself on the inside of my skin, 
    or that it is still there…

3.	Drive inland from Isafjordur, to just past the seals at Sudavik. 
    Look for the land-lettered sign for waffles and coffee, the mossed
    and lichened Litlibaer, grass-roofed, stone walls three feet deep.
    You must allow for enchantment; slip your seal body and find your shoes. 
    Inside, all is steam and a richness of coffee, chocolate, ancestors’ portraits,
    grandmother’s dresses, rifles and ships adorning the walls. 
    Rain streaks the windows pewter; your waffles drift in whipped cream. 
    If you leave a gold shade of yourself here, find me in the kitchen; 
    I’ll be at the window, grating nutmeg into thickening batter,
    my Selkie fingers warm against the cold

4.  Accept all foolhardy offers to paddle into the thickening; 
    put the green kayak into the harbor and shove yourself free. 
    Measure your strokes with kindness; the seals are all around you in the fog. 
    Here in the shallows, the long grasses reach up, chlorophilic; 
    do not peer too long into their depths; do not close your eyes and dream
    when the ferry’s foghorn calls your name. 
    If the yellow-haired fisherman on the blue boat greets you
    with coffee, pause to drink with him,
    for it is not often we are gifted a sharing of heat
    while floating alone in our skins on the great, pulling deep

5.  Advection fog is born of warm, wet air moving across a body
    of water, of the pressing together of molecules hot and cool;
    it catches and lingers on trees, in the hollows of throats
    and abdominal planes.
    Somewhere, I imagine hands strong enough
    to press such currents into each other,
    a dew point at which my body blossoms into peonies, 
    glowing in secret beneath the cover of fog