Sealskin

I return, again, to the ICU, where you are in your second day of mechanical breathing. There is nothing to hold onto, and I build cairns without sign posts as we journey into the incorporeal. Book in hand, I return, again, to the hard geographical fact of Christiane and husband between new black mountains and Sorge Bay, the “Bay of Grief.”¹ Glacial ice falls into frozen fjord. It is their first day in the wilderness alone in a wretched hut, and Christiane sees gallows beyond the fog. Nothing blooms there, but she returns, again, to her front garden, moves about polar bears skulls, thoraxes, forelegs into an arrangement of sorts. Stands to see a soft seal head cut the surface of the waves beyond the shore. The hunter doesn’t miss this time, he instructs Christiane—fetch basin, water, knife. Hands her the pulsing organs of the beating heart cadaver. Stretches sealskin over her bone plot. I stretch my body over your legs. Think of my children at home. Listen to the soft rattling sound.