The first thing I saw
the first morning I went out for a walk in Stykkishólmur
was a crow

as big as a chair.
What’s that chair doing on top of that house? I thought
then it flapped away.

A crow that big is called a raven.
Corvus corax in Linnaeus’s binomial system.
Each one makes a sound

like a whole townful of ravens
in the country I come from.

He got a job in the local library shelving government documents. It
was
agreeable to work in a basement
humming with fluorescent tubes and cold as a sea of stone. The
documents
had a forlorn austerity,
tall and hushed in their ranges as veterans of a forgotten war.
Whenever
a librarian came clumping
down the metal stairs with a pink slip for one of the documents,
Geryon would vanish into the stacks.
A little button at the end of each range activated the fluorescent track
above it.
A yellowing 5 × 7 index card
Scotch-taped below each button said EXTINGUISH LIGHT WHEN
NOT IN USE.
Geryon went flickering
through the ranges like a bit of mercury flipping the switches on and
off.
The librarians thought him
a talented boy with a shadow side. One evening at supper when his
mother
asked him
what they were like, Geryon could not remember if the librarians
were men
or women. He had taken a number
of careful photographs but these showed only the shoes and socks of
each person.
They look like mostly men’s shoes to me,
said his mother bending over the prints which he had spread on the
kitchen table.
Except—who’s that? she pointed.
It was a photograph taken from floor level of a single naked foot
propped on
the open drawer of a metal file cabinet.
On the floor beneath lay a dirty red Converse sneaker on its side.
That’s the assistant head librarian’s sister.
He pulled forward a photo of white acrylic socks and dark loafers
crossed at the ankle: assistant head librarian.
She comes in at five sometimes to get a ride home with him. Geryon’s
mother
looked closer. What does she do?
Works at Dunkin’ Donuts I think. Nice girl? No. Yes. I don’t know.
Geryon glared. His mother reached out
a hand to touch his head but he ducked sideways and began
gathering up
the photographs. The phone rang.

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

Omens are for example hearing someone say victory as they pass you in the street
or to be staring
at the little sulfur lamps in the grass
all around the edge of the hotel garden
just as they come on. They come on at dusk.
*
In the effort to find one’s way among the contents of memory (Aristotle emphasizes)
a principle of association is helpful –
“passing rapidly from one step to the next.
For instance from milk to white,
from white to air,
from air to damp,
after which one recollects autumn supposing one is trying to recollect that season.”

Anne Carson, The beauty of the husband