Draw a circle around Iceland east. Go south at least to Britain, then to Rome.

The west resides in ocean north where arctic lights fluoresce.

I wrote to salmon, trout and otter, bottom creatures on their bed, crab and coral, sea poems in pens, starfish armed a decade, a dozen arms that fold, the hands that bend limestone with pink polyps, build coral among plankton and aconite digits, poems of fishing banks with just one line to the hydrozoa net of amphipod for cod.

We walked the summer floor of white humpbacks in lamaria forests. I took his hand, pointed the skipjack and the coal fish, like buildings in a strange museum, galleries up circular stairs, but it was below the fjord, out on skerries among seals he took his abc, in his parlance the futs, my futhark, soul mate son, to whom I keep saying:

“no matter what you have done, in transfiguration of dawn the universe is filled with redemption, regenerate son. When the last sin is counted redeemed amphipods and dead men’s fingers, redeemed mountains folding a complex plunge, emergent mountains of gravel or shale, the whole west sea floor, sediment, sandstone, coral voices pressed up into long axes of recharged magma all transformed, all made new, basements of our unfolding. Redemption is massive, deep seated from its crust in octagons to the crystal ice sheets that cover us, heads of moraines, shell rich shaved lines of iron and copper ore morning.”

I wanted him to know the image of himself as far as he could see the land, the arctic foxes’ hundred exits among weasels and voles, lemmings and interest rates. Of shrews and hare, badger and hedge hog we took views. It was the stone tunnels all over again to me, the transit of verse in endless epic north of the Krillion among bird rocks. Little nests of poems concealed in rock falls among the vertical cliffs, a puffin in the peat, islets of shag statues, rock razor mots, flocks like white clouds surrounding cliffs.

We ended up on the bird rocks of Helmsay, nesting cliffs of rookeries, colonies of hijacked lapwings, herons among hens, that’s as noble a place as any, still holding his hand, murmuring the kindergarten greenshank and black gull beak, the god tit and stint, the bean goose, wagtail, wood cork geeing spirits of pipits and tits and buntings.

You’d think he could have gone to libraries to read books but instead to the frost and pine roots, bugs in bogs with raised domes among vaginatum. We went to mires and fens, brown moss mats that covered bed rock, our office up East Finnmark in the birch belt among geranium and angelica, rested in alpine heliophilous and snow lilies where the snow lies late under eaves of willow and saxifrage, a constant damp rill of lichen. The heather boys in their boulder streams run beneath the nanatak sculpture of the mountains. We were the refuge of circumpolar, the pseudo-frigida marsh and mallow. We were the milk vetch and hard fern among fescue and woodruff.

Futhark Futhark, I would call from miles out or up and he would sense it and come breathless and we would run miles together like two herd animals steam making, laughing, sometimes collapse to mock fatigue, call out to each other, “help, help me I’m drowning, I think I broke broking,” at which he would flip.

When he began to flip I knew the training took, elan as marrow, willow hair flowing, gold M star. I was fool-covered with love with what, yes I had made, but had nothing to do with it, not himself or the sea, though I can’t imagine the mother ice so huge in him except it was. We were pens to write the flowing. I never turned to look behind. I would rise with feeling and words in the crevice of the rock where I hid and found Futhark hiding. I pulled him out and said, “Futhark you are more joy than I can stand.”