On my last night in Reykjavik
I was stranded in church, where
in a bloodshot midsummer night
Scandinavian chants oscillated
in the chill of red brick and incense.

There was a hint of everything
in this resonance, a flaring up
from sea mammal to protozoan
and a farewell of hubristic hands
awkwardly tracing the stratosphere.

Something had long ago chastened my alto
to a sore monologue, inhabiting a cry
frisking the silence for ears to be dulled in.
And now, carried like an airborne infection
or raised from a coma, prima facie

this voice trailed off amidst the mummed
Icelandic descants and the certitude
that no blackness of night would precede
the bright spray of morning. And rife
with the chance to be voice before vibrancy

and just as uniform and utterly elated as these nuns,
red-cheeked and rapt like alleged Eves
at the sight of a plain apple, I noticed too late
the last song fading to murmur, the air
growing algid and my voice retiring

to the pallid afterglow of something titillating.
They scurried away like church mice,
taking sweat and theurgy home
to mollified hearts and a pellmell
of prayers and salvation, leaving me

with a mouthful of soliloquies
striking root on the rearmost tear
and conceiving nothing but the mere concept
of making memories, pondering
whether or not to say Amen.