![]()
DEAR, BELOVED
Child. We are done for
in the most remarkable ways.
—BRIGIT PEGEEN KELLY, “Dead Doe”
It would be winter, with a thin snow. An aged sunbeam
would fall on me, then on a nearby summit, until a mass
of ice would appear like a crown of master diamonds
in shades of gold and pink. The base of the mountains
would be still in darkness. The snow would melt,
making the mountain uglier. The ice would undertake
a journey toward dying. My iliacus, from which orchids bloom,
would learn to take an infant’s shape, some premature creature
weaned too soon. My femoral nerve, from which lichen grows
in many shades, would learn to take breaths of its own
and would issue a moan so labored it could have issued
from two women carrying a full-length wooden casket, with dirt
made from a girl inside. The dirt would have been buried
with all of the girl’s celestial possessions. Bearing the casket
would demand more muscles than earthbound horses have.
The girl would have been twenty-four. This was my visio.
Sometimes I think of it as prophecy. Other times, history.
For years it was akin to some specific land, with a vessel
that would come for me, able to cross land, sea, the spaces
of the universe, able to burrow deep into the ground.
Anything could summon it—a breaking in cloud cover,
wind chimes catching salt outside my mother’s window,
a corner of a painting. And I learned how to call it, too.
This is the only skill of which I have ever been proud.
When my sister died, from the head of my visio came offspring
in the thousands, armed to the teeth, each its own vessel.
My first, their mother, lived on. For itself and its hoard
it found a permanent home in a cave at the bottom of a lake.
And it waited until I was standing on a mountain to sing to me:
You will call this mountain home until I tell you to move again.
There will always be more of it underground than you
will ever see with your eye. And so it turned out to be true.
And so when I stood on the mountain that became my home,
I beheld a dirt sea, and I saw our moon, which has two faces.
I learned that one face of our moon is dappled with maria,
and that the sunbeams here are newborns that lie
on each other, purpling into the fog and outstretched pines.
Earth spins masses of air until it looks like one of the many
irises studding our galaxy. From space, parts of the Atlantic
look like leather, wrinkled and dark, and others look
like iridescent fishes in an Old Master’s painting of the sky.
I live in the valley of a crater here, where steam rises like ghosts
in the summer heat. This mountain is made of igneous stone.
Every day I issue a warning to lovers: Darlings, I have
in my possession a dead girl deer. Her head is draped
over my right shoulder. I hold her with one arm
encircling her torso. You wake each morning with flowers
shrouding your body, like a corpse; I put them there.
To me, you died when my legs curved around your head.
One of the deer’s eyes has blackened, and her tongue is thick.
She belonged to my sister. O my sister, you were twenty-four.
Listen close. Even to this part. Especially this.
I want you to hear what I say to lovers, because I want to sing
to you, who died a virgin, a few treatises on love and sex—
how flesh and ecstasy are born, what they make,
how they live out their days. As a bodied girl
you feared me, and I met your fear with guttural disdain.
I imagine you wondered what it would take for me to hear
a mortal, human voice: whenever you spoke, a vessel came
for me, chattering like some frail and hissing bird,
pigeon-chested, thin-veined feet. Sister, I don’t listen to lovers,
either, who I call by the same names that were yours:
dear, beloved. But spirits are not like their progenitors.
Their touches can range from velvet to bristle.
Lover, each time I kiss you I name after you
a sickly feeling in my own body, as if each ailing
is a previously undiscovered moon orbiting a planet
that can only sustain the strangest of life-forms.
Sister, I know neither goodness nor mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life, as surely as I know the beasts
I inherit or create, of all unions familial or otherwise,
are speechless and brute, and bound to die soon.
Yes, there is much to love about the body.
Too, there is much to hate. I cast off care for pleasure,
and for labor, teaching my body over time that these things
can’t coexist. I fear it has started to believe me.
My body has never sought wholeness the way yours did, sister.
It was always still the dull twilight of early morning with us.
You were twenty-four, and when you died, I stopped fearing
arson. When I picture us as girls, we are at the base
of the mountain from my visio, divining the summit
as we diminish into spots of light. We are without parentage.
On my mountaintop in midafternoons flocks of wheeling
birds gather around the crescent moon. When the moon
worms its way through the clouds, it fixes its eyes on me
and sings a song that says we live our lives chained to earth,
and that when we die the flesh falls off our bones
so our bones can turn into the driest of riverbed dirt.
Sister, when you died, your bones cast an enchantment.
We made a powder of them, and I named the powder ash,
because ash is a word with neither origin nor afterlife,
and its definition is the look a doe gets when she’s been away
from her herd too long. When a person goes missing
and we don’t know her name, we grant her the surname Doe.
With this christening we name all missing persons
part of the family of ash, which ha...
