ISLE OF LIFE by Matthew Buxton Arnold Böcklin, 1888, oil on canvas Just after I asked you to marry me, I wanted to crystallize each sensory detail before they were compressed into PNGs of memory, or legend—Time levelled to image: a hotdog in Christmas-red foil, Spanish climbers swaying in the line beneath the towering phallus of Expressionism pricking a sky blue with its modest cross, sour salt in cold air, trap music blasting from a government building, the tourist standing dead center in the camera’s focal point. Our photographer said he’d Photoshop the people around us out. Erasure is a strange violence. As is all. When the doctored image was returned in water- mark with a spindly AI-generated palm tree at the right edge of November in Reykjavík, I knew we were doomed. We knew the glaciers would be extinct in forty years. I took a photo of them dying. The photographer was taking a photo of us dying. I said something corny about gravity, and that I felt like I was happening to the world for the first time. With you. You said, yes. Asked if I had hired people to cheer. That you felt more physically aware of the world: saw rocks, the poet’s prayer engraved in the stone base of the church, mud under ice under a playground, the yellow-beaked gulls perched on an island of ice in the pond—so still they looked frozen in sunset’s paint. The swans swam up to our ankles, honking like begging gods, tangled black seaweed of legs. The photographer squatted down, looked in their eyes, said, “I have nothing for you today.”
