When we grow old, my dear,
and the crows come to get us
(caw-caw, then off
with one beat of their wings, into the air),
where will our love be then?
 
Where will this mouth be then that says
something about a broken coffee-machine, rust on the car, a visit to the
cardiologist, a filling that has fallen out, the phone bill
or (romantic) about the golden moon
and the rowan-tree in blossom, which explains away all the white
lies, the cheatings, and all it doesn’t manage to say about the child
we never had, and that melts together
with yours in a kiss?
 
Or these eyes that stare into the green computer screen day
out and day in and that look at you when you take your clothes off as evening draws on:
you put the light out modestly and stand like a silhouette with ripe breasts
and thighs against the light that seeps thinly
in through the windows from the cobalt-blue Iceland Sea?
 
Or these hands that write and write, that put
the snow-shovels in their place and caress you
over your limbs until you burn and want to have me
like a force that smashes into the dams, and I explode
cascading into you, into your womb that was removed
by a surgeon in Reykjavík?
 
All this that we call love –
where will it be, when the crows come?
For they will not take us both together. One of us
will be the first to lie out there on the ground dirtied by snow
down by the sea (yellow last year’s grass, churned-up spring snow)
when the black crows come and pick at the mouth,
the eyes, the hands, the genitals.
 
That one of us who is left behind the window then, dear,
who wakes in the mornings and does everything
we are familiar with, fetches in Morgunblaðið which sits
in the letterbox. Turns on the taps
and looks at oneself in the mirror: does that one of us then see something more
than one’s own face there? Will the other face then
shine through the face in the mirror, as abandoned houses
stand and shine by the sea?