Yours Truly 2016 / Cascadia College / Bothell, WA | Page 55

Burnished stones are embedded in the
sand. A worried woman runs her errands,
pushing a baby in a stroller. A black bruise
harnesses her eye. Sometimes, in a storm,
the North Sea rushes right up into Kirkwall
and licks the toes of the cathedral.
Nostalgia for place, my friend said, is
replacing nostalgia for time, for event. Both
are sentimental.
It depends, I said. When you travel, space
becomes time. I see Orkney suspended in a
glass cup, the island skimming the top and
the dead choking the water below. History is
cupped and intimate, a scream under glass.
A caress under glass. A murmur. A moan.
The guard lifts his torch and points to
what the Vikings wrote when they ripped
open these tombs.
“This says,
beautiful.”

Ingeborg

is

the

most

His voice is sour as dirty sheets. He displays
the tombs like a pimp displaying his whore.
His inflections are Scots and Norwegian,
descended from the Viking scribbler and
the Orcadian who took Ingeborg’s place.
Here’s my version: First there was Skara
Brae, the Neolithic settlement, where no one
died by violence, no skulls were impaled with
spears, no bones crushed by truncheons.
Their walls were three layers thick against
the wind – a stone wall; a fill of garbage,
fish-bones, excreta; another stone wall. The
settlement became too small; the people
spread across the island and then came the

generation of these kings, the spear and the
truncheon. The invaders came. Drank their
liquor from Orkney skulls, took the land,
defiled the graves, dragged shinbones from
altar-stones, waved the king’s elbows in the
streets. And now their descendant unveils
before foreign eyes the secret, brackish
tunnel into the stalk of the island.
I rise like a diver shooting to the surface.
The town swirls down a steep incline and
stops with a skid at the seawall. I stop with
a skid at the seawall. Sunlight crashes like
waves, though it is ten at night. The bride
and groom sit with me. I perch. Shards of
glass are heaped below us on the highway. A
car must have hit the wall. I am eating curry

“I rise like a diver
shooting to the surface”
from a greasy counter shop full of lankhaired teenagers. They bounce from one
side of the spider-shaky street to the other,
rushing to the sea and back, and the wind
is more active than their lives. It bells and
clangs the walls.
The bride says, “You think you are
watching, but it is us. Your skin is transparent
and the dead are shining through. We are
what your blood has forgotten. You are the
shadow and the flat green pasture. You are
the woman with seaweed in her hair.”

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