Mike Dickman and Claudia Walther
***
Norn


1

norn

one i

have i


no eye

adorns

my

face



2

i to i

no eye to eye



3

sight is making

forms

weaving

ropes of space


4

norns

nurse teeth

and

eyes


we

cold sleet

and

lies


5

into these eyes

pours

sea!

day

light

infinity

of


spheres

inter-

reflecting

shadow

- infinite -


riding

on

infinite light


6

this much simple

thing this

ordinarily just

seeing

this

inter

play

of lights (is it?)

or


sound?

(who makes the names?)


rounds now

into

silence


this


sound returned to sound

light to light

breath

to

breath

death

to


less than

no


and

more than

less than no


and


death
***
author's note:

I wrote these verses in a single thrust, one wintery evening in 1990, when Ed Heckerman showed me some photos taken by Claudia Walther, of votary offerings of symbolic eye-tokens, worked in silver, and offered, by the blind, at a church in Switzerland, the name of whose saint now escapes me (St. Odilie)

My own vision, too, being of the fading kind, and remembering Borges and his heroic The Gifts, I was suddenly swamped with a vision of the Norns - Urd, Verdande and Skuld - the Fates according to Norse legend, possessors, between them, of one tooth, and a single, bright eye.

On a sunny afternoon of gold and palest blue in the autumn of 1993, I came back to them for a while, resetting some of the spaces, and moving - or removing - a word or two here & there.


Mike Dickman
Ivry-sur-Seine,
November 1993
***