from What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium

I find a bird’s skull on the beach.
We never find the skeletons of people.
The eye sockets are black.
We just dump our dead into holes in the ground
outside churches.
It grieves me.
In Paris, I once saw stacks of skulls.
I don’t know the names of the birds here.
 
When John James Audubon
was 34 years old,
he decided he was going to paint watercolors
of every bird in America.
His Birds of America gradually appeared
between 1827 and 1838.
 
Audubon painted over 700 birds
that he had shot and killed.
 
The birds here don’t sing,
they cry out in pain.
 
 
 
 I happen across brown slugs
devouring
each other
silently.
Close to the seashore.
Epochs evoked like developing photos.
The Swiss scientist Albrecht von Haller sketched
the decapitated head of a man in 1756.
In Haller’s Physiology, muscle movement
was not the result of mechanics alone.
It was caused by something at work beyond consciousness.
This is how decapitated heads could blink their eyes
and dead animals thrash their limbs about.
G.F.W. Hegel maintained
that true infinity
could not be comprehended,
that the universe is an elementary particle
of a much larger universe.
You are my universe.
I can’t wait to be like that dead bird.
 
I embrace my insignificant role in everything.
Here with the leaves,
the sea.
This landscape is developing me.
I learn to wait.
 
 

The red seat on this bus is still warm
                                    from the last person who sat on it.
A voice on the radio reads the death notices.
We go quiet for a moment.
We’re on our way back to study the photographs
from Oyndarfjørður Church’s confirmation
                                    in the spring of 1954.
Fermented fish and coffee afterward.

Between baby carriages, hearses, and thieving crows
                                    the day slips away.
That afternoon you closed your eyes for the last time,
a Faroese woman ran a marathon in Prague
                                         with a time of 2:50:57.
Anthropologists confirmed that Homo sapiens
and Neanderthals had offspring,
                                    their genes are in us.
 
Scientists in Geneva got closer to discovering the Higgs
boson in the CERN particle physics research laboratory
even though this could have created a new galaxy
and blown up the earth.
The city buses with red seats are still running on time.
The condensation inside the bus
makes everyone look like impending ghosts.
 
 
 
My apartment is empty, only a white column
holds the ceiling up.
Lightbulbs dangle
down to the floor, like a luminous body
drawn between silence and time,
shedding light on the dark squares
that pictures cast on the wall,                               
a palimpsest.
Soon someone else will live here,
just like someone else I didn’t know
lived here before me.
One of the lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling flickers,
she’s about to blow.
I take photographs down off the wall.
In one black and white photograph, there you sit
behind the garage at two years old
in green rubber boots, swallowing small stones.
Now I’ve thrown three boxes                                                                     
of memories away,
the story’s going to start over.       
I want to watch continents go by,
but the connection between centuries
isn’t as good
as I thought it would be.
 

 
I want to build a wall
of small, iron boxes
in my mind
and make an assemblage of everything                
I forgot here.
 
After the clothes are worn,
the houses are bequeathed to others,
and the streets have been renamed,
all that remains is a mountain of garments,
pictures,
burned-out bulbs.
 
A collection of heartbeats
between the bygone
millennium
and
this.


 
For all the island dwellers
who hear the waves tonight
and know
how it is 
to be human
for a moment between mountain and sea.
 
For the international brother and sisterhood
of insomniacs
(most take their lives at 04:48).
 
For those whose emotions have sense and sensibility
and a heart that reflects.
 
For all of you who know all too well
that there aren’t any real boundaries
on our planet.
 
The international republic of world literature
doesn’t correspond to the lines on the map
that govern the rest of the world.