Dear, beloved

Child. We are done for in the most remarkable ways. — Brigit Pegeen Kelly 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 come upon me 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