—which is the Norse myth about the wolf-god who hunts, pursues the sun
around the earth, mouth open, lantern jaws sprung wide to consume, finally
snap down around the glowing orb: how the people of that land once described
solar eclipses to one another, believing that, breaking the neck of their only light,
the wolf-god had damned them to darkness—the kind that only burial understands,

I tell myself when I find you asleep in our empty bathtub and wake you from
another dream about drowning. Reaching up, you hold onto my ribcage as though
holding onto a stone in the middle of whatever river threatens to erase you in sleep.
You’re grave-making, again. Through the soap, I can still smell the soil soaked into
your shoulders, feel the weight of the dirt straining across the nape of your neck as

your shape curls like a fist into my chest cavity, pulling me in with you and down—
so this is how light must feel, I think: exhausted, knowing that, once broken open,
it will never stop running, trying to escape itself. Mother, you are your mother’s
daughter. People say this when they meet you. And it’s not an answer, it’s an
apology. I’m sorry. Sorry she’s not here, they say. Or sorry about her, she couldn’t help

being herself. Sorry she didn’t get to see how you turned out. And you turn away. Here’s
a riddle that keeps you up at night: a man dies in a locked room with a hole in his head,
there’s water on the floor, blood in his hair, what happened? Not unlike, a man falls asleep
and wakes to find that he’s killed 200 people, how is this possible? But more like if your
mother is X and your dreams Z, solve for Y—which could either be your father’s memory

or a bottle or everything else you didn’t want to inherit. Something is always missing. It’s
noon: every window of our house is a mirror reflecting her silhouette from yours,
carving your form out of sky, and leaving a plague’s worth of grackles scattered
beneath the wall-length glass outside, a constellation of wet, iridescent torsos
shivering into stillness, a cosmos you rake into piles and burn like damp leaves—

why is that? That we bury what won’t stay up or go down? We were raised
to think more of our dead than as something to bury, raised to believe there’s no
way forward but down, no way out but through. We pray for what destroys us.
I haven’t lived enough to explain this kind of sacrifice to you with anything
that isn’t my body lifting yours from the porcelain to move you to your bedroom.

The cause of death is always an icicle. The murderer is always a sleeping lightkeeper:
I’m sorry to be the one who has to tell you. I’m sorry how it’s supposed to be noon,
how the days are shorter now, how the woods beyond us have become an orchestra
of abandoned trees, wild and hungry for wind, for anything that would move them
without being seen, bodies aching for touch without contact, how you shudder

in your sleep by night and shout, howl into cloud by day for anything, something
to obey you or come back to earth. Mother, the sycamores grieve for you like cellos:
how else can I convince you that this kind of safety is love? Come out—, they say.
You must come outside to scare the wolf away: an entire nation gathered beneath
the sky, screaming to bring back the star that sooner or later blinds us all.