Forgotten Ground Regained
Ymir
You’re walking on Ymir now, you know,and the sky is still his split skulland the oceans we boiled were once his blood.Only the ice isn’t him, the glaciersformed by flowing rivers that frozeinto a steeping slag of solid coldand grew and gathered into a huge gapdividing and blending into an ice darkness,a winter dusk, a dim, cold blacknessonly gap, only gorge, only a gulfat the bottom and beginning of time.No words, no awareness, only a wellof cold cutting wind and creeping rain.
But on the border of that broad abysswas heat and humid light that made the hoarfrostdrip and pool and develop into the designof a man’s body, a mountain of bones and moisturethat rose near the roots of that Real Treeand the Nine Women who lived in that Wood –a man who when he slept sweated a whole speciesfrom under his arm. This was Ymir,father of the first families that fled from his bodyas a dripping of clear drops that drewmoisture and warmth to become men and women.A cow then came from that dripping chaosborn of the brine of that melting breach,and milk ran in four rivers from its udders,and Ymir drank from those dugs every day.
Other bodies were brought into being,licked into life as the cow lapped blocks of salty iceuntil its tongue and the salt and stinging frostbecame the heat’s heart, and a wholeness.And these salt bodies and these sweat bodieswere the ones that rose up and ruled over Ymir,and they beat bowls into shape for his bloodand those vessels became the voluminous seaand the earth was bound by the border made from his body,and his teeth turned to stoneand the bones of his body became mountainsand our starry sky is his skulland that space set aside for sun and moonand the stage for the seasonswere just the blood-stained dome of Ymir’s head,and the gore of his gashed flesh our great earth.
So just as the skalds and storytellers are saidto produce their poetry from the cup of his skull,the fire for feuds – and the fights between families,and how we all feign to flee from formlessness –they are all baked into our bodies, this brutality,the viciousness of this essence, with no escape.
Copyright © Tim Miller, 2025
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