Prose Selections from Rust in the Role of Timber and Wind

Translated from Faroese by Matthew Landrum


You’re always chilly when it’s not cold enough for a coat yet, and then it’s good to have a sweater, if you’re not opposed to wearing one — it’s writing made of wool that writes you into warmth, so that you know how the cold feels when it pretends to be heat that can’t read.

*

There are climates in language. I don’t mean words about language. Some sentences are a kind drizzle. Others are evil hurricanes. Words eat words. The words are cannibals. A fucking snowflake doesn’t live long either. Language is nature. She’s evil and good. Also, you must sing loud when singing. Not like a goose, but like an evil hag who beats her children with kind words. That’s what nature’s like, and you can never trust her. The breezes are still farting the old cliché: the sea giveth and the sea taketh away. And don’t steal, you old skunk. But you can walk around here, around the kettle. Fermented fish is almost as bad for your health as it tastes. Words must be fresh, if the sentence is to be old. I like what I don’t like. Words can be misunderstood fish balls that begin to roll away when someone hungry sits down. You have a poor nose that can’t tell the difference between smell and fragrance. You’re a stranger, says the taste. I’ll show you the path where entangled tongues lose their way. Should I quit, or should I make something of it? The question that drowns the answers is accused of animal abuse. I can hear the thunder rolling closer, and my name gives a start inside of me. But it doesn’t make me jump and I don’t speed up or slow down. My head is full of other heads, skulls that spew the past into me. I’m not afraid of ghosts, but hate them like food which I sink my teeth in anyway, just to leave a mark.

*

Again, I long to sit on a train and let the landscape, whirring past, lull me to sleep so that I won’t wake up until I’m in some city I didn’t know existed and that doesn’t look like any other city I’ve seen.

*

Ashes aren’t reliable portent. You can’t tell your fortune in them, but you can draw with them or scatter them on ice so you won’t slip and break your leg. My hip tells me that I ought to stop and sit down on a block of wood. Maybe the crows will tuck their young in with the grey hairs I pick from the shower drain and throw out the attic window. You reach the point in life where you remember every step and try desperately to retrace them. It’s good to see something green sprouting out of the earth, whether it can be eaten or whether it’s just for decoration. How do you keep what you already have? What if a statue suddenly came to life in front of you and told you it represented all that’s good in the world? You wouldn’t believe it, but you wouldn’t argue. Evil’s in the circumstances and in the eyes of the beholders.



Little Kastle

Sounds from the outside world were already diminishing, reduced to raspy gusts pirouetting restlessly before fading into an air drenched with odd, darkening colors. Now it was the beating of his heart that began to disturb the silence.


From Angel Dinner

At the end of November, the angels appear in the forest. They arrive with the first frost.


Six Poems from Frayer

In houses all alike women embroider / your future on moccasins sold / to tourists. It's as if the light is waning.