Antidote to the Chaos of Imagination

← v8n2, Fall 2009

Each of us knows the heathen sky in our own way.

Mine has no blue. What remains is a vast cloud

that draws up the ground and bay, as the light steeps

in an even stumble of rain. It’s the rain of childhood

and one or two Aztec gods. But here, in Reykjavik,

it has brought the seagulls down from foraging for

kittens. The great mountain Esja, our protector and

home to two giants—male and female—stopped being

a flat stone and has disappeared . . .

To the north, a sheep farmer in Arnarfjord

can’t remember the last time he received

a visitor. He has no wife or heifer. On days like this,

he’ll sit content at the kitchen window with his half

reflection, coffee, and a cigarette’s ember all day.

place solitude nature

Christopher Burawa

Christopher Burawa’s works include the collection The Small Mystery of Lapses (Cleveland State University Press, 2006), and the forthcoming translation Flying Night Train: Selected Poems of Jóhann Hjálmarsson (Green Integer, 2009). He won the 2005 Toad Press International Chapbook Competition for his translations of Hjálmarsson. He has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony; the National Endowment for the Arts, for literary translation; and the American-Scandinavian Foundation. He received a Witter Bynner Poetry Translation Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in 2006. He is the director of the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee.