WHAT THE CLOUDS ARE THINKING

"Huggin!"

"Muninn!"

We call our dogs
and they come running

black black
as ravens

faster than thought
and memory.

Excited they tell me
of all the many

smells
they have encountered.

What it is like
to just run

for no other purpose
than the running.

They see the world
through smell and speed.

Delight in
just being.

Outrunning the wind.

The sudden scratch
of a bramble across an eye

is a happenstance
that sees me

wearing a black eye patch
with a diamante twinkling.

I see the world better
with my one eye.

The other was too lazy.

"Yeah yeah...it's the world!
So what!"

Lazy eye easily
bored with perceiving.

Looking, but:
not seeing.

The dogs see me
as the reincarnation

of Odin.

The land is lost
in mist and myth.

The mist devouring
a man

with every footstep
the world erased.

Yet, I outpaced it
gazed once again

upon a moon madly
in love with its reflection.

Look up into the sky
the inside of a skull

that once belonged
to the great giant Ymir

whose death
made all life possible.

Odin and Vili and Ve
make soil from his flesh

bones become
mountains

blood becoming seas.

"See the clouds..?"
I tell my little girl

( already far more
ancient than I )

"They were once
Ymir's brains!"

She accepts all this
with great aplomb.

"I wonder..."
she ponders
"I wonder.. . .

what the clouds
are thinking?"