Vegvísir

By that shoal swam
myth and majesty,
each with a face,
blurry still with
the tide settling.

And there became
a convergence of souls
in that shallow place,
a commune of spirits
of our own devising.

Their stories lie
among the stacks
in shades of blue,
captured loosely
in an afternoon.

Funny how nature
comes alive when
you want it to
and shutters one
rainy day in June.

***

Somewhere out in the world (really not entirely sure of where), there had been some sort of natural phenomenon that had created a new network of rivers. They were named the Venetian Rivers because of how they closely resembled the city of Venice. And each river had its own name and its own book, which was especially strange given that they had literally just appeared pretty recently. But the books told these stories about these river spirits that lived there. I found them so interesting because it seemed like they had just made their own little community totally out of nowhere. Like, where had they come from? Why now?

So I was in this classroom with this like relatively small library just next door. I kept going back and forth hunting for all the river books and bringing them back to the classroom and I would stack them up on top of room one and only bookshelf. They were these absurdly large picture books with green covers and each one had some Norse runes on the spine. And I was trying to organize them somehow but I don’t exactly know how to read Norse runes. I wanted to learn about them, but I wanted to start at the beginning, wherever that was. So I ended up never getting the chance.