SAGA

                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Weather Reports You 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Roni Horn 
 
Will, if I reach out my hand, the sea come to me, a stone? 
 
Harsh grace in a dorsal line aligns me without being arbitrary, thus I am here. 
 
And with me a vertigo of emptiness, of a world, that takes nothing back. 
 
To interrupt this feeling. 
 
When I say emptiness, do I mean more than empty of humans? 
 
Intoning apocalypse with bread soup, or love, coincidence, cliché. 
 
Why should I want to be in the picture anyway? 
 
I have to look at the weather. Its disheveling crosscurrent. 
 
All emotions are true. 
Everyone here came over water. 
 
Like them I will feel hunger. Dark, desert. Touching. 
 
The sunken forest beneath Cardigan Bay that I looked at from Ty Newydd without seeing it. 
 
What does Hecla have to do with it, Katla, Laki, the island’s mountain’s glacier? 
 
Or droughts in Egypt, the French Revolution. 
 
I don’t mean this monocausally. 
 
I came through safe third countries, spores on my shoe. 
 
I’m counting on consequences. 
 
Like continents ripping bit by bit and grinding sight in raining ash. 
 
On the green of 600 species of moss. 
 
Entries of the brightest finitude. 
Gudridur Thorbjarnardottir, granddaughter of a British slave, traveled, around the year 1000, from Norway to Iceland, Greenland, Vinland, Greenland, Norway, Iceland, Rome, Iceland. 
 
Where she came upon human settlements all over and bore the first European child on American soil, Snorri Thorfinnson. 
 
Which is further than Leifur Eriksson, who for some time was her brother-in-law. 
 
But hardly further than 500 years later, Enrique Melaka, Malayan slave and translator in the fleet of Magellan. 
 
No survival without navigation. 
 
No navigation without turnover of bodies into labor, goods, silence, missions, capital. 
Botany also calls moss a pioneer plant. 
 
It says pioneers need dozens of years to grow on fresh lava. 
 
No habitat where water can’t flow, soak. 
 
And another dozen after being uprooted from trampling and grazing. 
 
Meanwhile, transported Alaskan lupines are to form sediments on deserts left by man, cattle, climate. 
 
Degrees of degradation. Sense of possibility. 
 
To briefly find balances in the pull of need and erosion. 
 
Where something gains contours through recess. 
 
I don’t mean this as metaphor. 
 
I mean the kind of fiction that emerges from fact. 
 
Translating my actions into selection.  
Dreamt of subjection again. 
 
Moments full of inertia. 
 
Where’s all this water from? 
 
Fog, foam, clouds, firn, ice, rain, snow – 
 
To enter their density. 
 
That is empty. Endless vacillation within. 
 
Drills me in positioning. 
 
Hypersensitive. Not sensitive enough. 
 
Do birds dream of shores? Or of their flight over oceans? 
 
Ravens climb from my hand.  
 
Their eyes, more than mine, see lands beyond the sea. 
BROOCHES 
 
 
To read without soul what’s ascending, the labor is barely recognizable in the thing. 
 
Seven layers of color on the bedroom door alone. 
 
Decades painted in flatness, or button rows. 
 
Due of no justice. 
To stay here further by virtue of labor, spreading. 
 
What one spends in alienation. 
 
Can deviation be simulated or avoided, how does something equal itself? 
 
Something like food stamps, in the name of the people, gladiola, ravioli. 
Those set over chasms, more than a fathom deep. 
 
As if beauty were but the mistake in a copy. 
 
Like a knob airily springs. 
 
If I just keep living like this, how close will I come to war? 
Brightness becomes tempered by emptiness, duty. 
 
Is revolt on, sick with rage, when sick is a pigeonhole? 
 
The ice sheet melts and drowns, even in winter, 
 
and yes it is winter. 
Fingering brooches from index strata, binding co-presence through time. 
 
Limes, Lindisfarne, Kiev – the Rus rows in cartography. 
 
Where does the Roman Empire end? 
 
The Roman Empire never ends. 
The silence stuttered from crickets, escaped its calling thus? 
 
Unsaturated. 
 
That cane brakes – 
 
Rage about, knee-high heroic. 
 
 
To the crops with tenderness full. 
 
Did obstinacy prove to the unyielding? 
 
Governs thunder, it darkens. 
 
Kit. Wrought upon. – No. 
 
 
Is everland still dozing by? Renounce. 
 
From realms of soil, eons –  
 
insprinc haftbandun, infar wîgandun – 
 
Glottis is not asleep, whistles.