We found you curled beneath the windowpane in the corner, between the brick and bush. Warm and not yet stiff, limp with dream and wet density of an August afternoon. Mute and motherless, your body was a self-embracing spiral, a withdrawal from the clawed savageness of the living. Into the bag, I gathered your speckled fur, infant’s rounded muzzle, lanky limbs. Although I felt strong, brave of heart, I wept as I carried you down the slick ravine and shoveled late into the humid dusk. By the end, when I stank of rot and sweat the moon had revealed herself to the sky resonating a strange, silver halo.
She purified us with silk and silence: our mother of stone, our angel of ice. Now in winter’s stark stillness, she murmurs
to you in your cradle of soil and leaf. Each black night, as you are swallowed further into Earth, she caresses you with her frosted beams – comforts us, mother and child, laden with memories of each other.
