My House of the Fjord - Part 2

We made love, of course, there on the jetty, as the cooling sun collected our sweat into pearls of sapphire and rolled them into to the Fjord from where they came. The Fjord sighed with thanks and appreciation. Sermons in stone, it whispered, and good in everything.

As we rested with our toes dipped into the lukewarm water, the poet Bream rose from the depths and smiled, looking at us each in turn before reciting his prose. We listened as the happy laughter of unseen children echoed around the hills that cocoon the fjord.

?Your house on the fjord is built of burnt oak,
Which steams in the sun and fills you with hope,
Above the door is a lop-sided grin -
On the dry husk of a lizard that once befriended me.

You wander around your house on the fjord,
With salt on your lips and sand in your ear,
Looking for places to conceal your harvest,
For the plentiful fjord is known to me.

The jetty that leads to your house on the fjord
Is carpeted with moss that feels warm on your feet,
And leads to the shore -
Where beach and sky meet.

You lie on the jetty with your toes in the fjord,
And let mermaids and manatees cleanse you of whim,
The lap of the waves lends you to me,
And you daydream of Ishmael?s Albatross laughing with glee.

At night the fjord bobs with Chinese lanterns,
Like the souls of anemones ascending to breath,
Carried along by a gentle wind from the east,
To fade into dusk when the fjord leaves them be.

Your house on the fjord is everything to you,
Mother, father, brother, friend, who listen to you,
As a child you would fear it?s sucking expanse,
But now, no fear, no more -
This fjord is all that you need.?

The bream sank with a wink and a final smile and I found myself alone again. The air around me sang with the recollections of the girl, her lemongrass scent mixing with the orange flavour of dusk. Dragonflies buzzed me and urged me to bed. Time to sleep, for the house on the fjord is yours to keep.

With a weary contentment I stood up and waved goodbye to the dragonflies who rang their belly-bells in farewell retreat. I stepped into my house on the fjord and lay myself down on my simple bed. I drew my seal-fur duvet over me and slipped into an easy sleep, as the feathery ghost of my beautiful dog, Suzie, sat guard at the door and eased me into dreams.

I?m floating on these dreams, on the pure water of the Fjord, letting myself drift with the current, as it sees fit. The wonders, and they are countless varieties, in the deep azure waters beneath flirt with me. Extraordinary creatures with concord in their manner, fish with gold in their eyes and butter in their wake, long dead friends tenderly blowing bubbles of pleasant memories which enter my nose and fizz like slow burning phosphorus, filling my limbs with joyful thoughts of unending companionship. Romance so pure that it almost renders my heart. I let the waters claim me and I sink into the deep, urged on by friends and other consorts ? the Bream and Manatees, shimmering Starfish and effervescent Jellyfish.

I bumped gently onto the sandy Fjord floor. I am not a religious man, but I have no shame in revealing to you what I saw there. Fortresses of something more than stone, slabs of a magnificent construction that rose above me, swarming with life that I cannot begin to describe, edifices of geometry that more than defied nature. And it was here, as I lay two thousand feet below the surface of my house of the Fjord, gazing with eyes too simple to comprehend what I was seeing, that I finally lay down to sleep. Comforted by the confident beat and swell of the water dwellers playing around me, I let the crabs and molluscs that rose from the sand to feed to pick on my uncertainties, and I looked up through the countless fathoms and saw the girl in red, washing her feet in water by my house in the fjord. She caught my eye and frowned, once again, at me.

(C) Martin Horton