I remember
when body hungered
for the vast

alone
in the closed call
of the Unna Räita hut;

a close world
inside the mist
of vast Swedish Lapland;

the grit,
the boulders,
the mountains,
obscured by the fog,
keeping still,
remaining silent,
– except for the occasional clattering
of falling rocks & gravel
far off, in various directions,
across differing elevations,
giving, little by little,
a hint of the landscape hiding in the brume,

the insides of the hut,
the limits of the obvious

as I fed the old iron stove,
thinned & cracked
by decades of hard burns,
with logs from the precious pile just outside,
brought up into the mountains
by snowmobile in the winter,

allowing a luxurious enjoyment of the warmth
permeating my minimized reality

as I lay back
on one of the two bunks,
my muscles receiving the endorphins
from the hike,

when, as I raised my gaze,
I discovered the spine of a book;

one single book
on a shelf up above the tiny window
under the low ceiling;

a white book with a red title:
Death and the Penguin,
by Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov,

which I reached for and began to read,
and later bought a copy of
in a city of the extended world
I had to re-enter;

a fresh literary discovery
that forever will color my recollections
of that wonderfully lonesome hike
in early fall 2010,

and which also inspired my further reading
of other Kurkov titles,
like The Case of the General's Thumb,
Penguin Lost,
A Matter of Death and Life
and The Good Angel of Death