The actual contours of our topography — inward and outward — are hidden. But here, from my niche in the amphitheater wall, I looked out on a barren coast that was all richness, where everything was revealed, everything was measured in immensities and scintillas. Walking, I imagined that cells roamed freely here, if they could do such a thing. That's how much space there was. The uninhabited islands across the fjord were not coveted by anyone. They were mine to explore, camp on, hunt from — or anyone's. And whatever happened there, it would, at some later date, be taken away by the advance of the glacier.

The hill is like night against the clear sky. Your head framed against it, barely moving, and moving with the sky. You are like a cloud seen between branches. In your eyes the laughter and strangeness of a sky that is not yours.

The hill of earth and leaves halts your bright gaze with its dark mass, your mouth has the curve of a gentle hollow between distant slopes. You seem to play with the great hill and the clearness of the sky: to please me you echo the ancient background and make it purer.

         But you live elsewhere.

Your gentle blood came from elsewhere. The words you say have no meeting-point with the rugged sadness of this sky. You are only a white and sweetly gentle cloud entangled one night among ancient branches.

What can I say to you? How can I retract All that that fool, my voice, has spoken_ Now that the facts are plain, the placid surface cracked, The protocols of friendship broken?

I cannot walk by day as now I walk at dawn Past the still house where you lie sleeping. May the sun burn these footprints on the lawn And hold you in its warmth and keeping.