The here is lost, the ticking now dissolves
to fancy: the future's flexing grey,
the past's foaming trail are nulled, and time
submissive: seamist has this actual world.
Through the screen of light without source
our vessel probes, the bar-room window falls
upon the slow Atlantic that lifts and falls
like a lung. Unlock. And nothing dissolves
that's not remade aeons from its source.
A scant millenium gone since out of the grey
Bjarni burst on Vinland, sunlit world*
at the edge of world. He's gone to time,
perhaps to the long recovery of time
that swings him back toward unaltered landfalls
and the same caution for a recondite world
sown with Manhattan. The coast dissolves
in gales to where his father's beard's grown grey
already, spine arc'd toward its source.
Ahead my destination and my source.
On deck the muffled birdwatch fills the time
identifying long-range gulls from grey,
and I conjure the childhood light that falls
on Dalvik's trawlers, the long dusk that dissolves
to pinhead stars, the shattered primal world
transmitting over darkness to the world
of knorr of diesel. There's light that left its source
when the Irish psalms on Irlaunde Mikkla dissolved*
to erik's farms, and the toc of axe in the time
on Vinland, that blind alley where the sea falls
still across that hooded man on the grey
beach of Greenland. The gulls that form from grey,
hook-beak down, skimming the herring's world,
these, and the diesel's heartbeat, are all that fall
on fact. Yet they, and these thoughts maybe, a source
and result, recomposing through all the time
that tangled atoms gather and dissolve.
A dark grey line, a shout of local source.
This is the actual world: the ship's on time,
the anchor falls: the Atlantic mist dissolves.
Author's Notes:
Bjarni Herjolfson discovered the coast of North America by accident when he was blown past the tip of Greenland on a voyage out from Iceland. He was the first Norseman to sea America and the report of his discovery spurred the later expeditions of Leif Eriksson and Thorfinn Karlsefni.
The Norse referred to Greenland as Irlaunde Mikkla, or Greater Ireland. There is literary and some archaeological evidence to show that the Irish were in Greenland before the Norse.