Tidal, Marginal, Sifting
On her brow: the head of a stag beetle, each eye a black dome sheened with golden dust. The antlers curve mahogany and the forked tips overlap, as elongated thumbs and fingers of hands held in prayer, or abeyance. Or readiness.
On her chest: a segment of weathered bone with a smooth channel that fits a forefinger in place of the decayed tissue. The outer bone-faces are rough with miniature caves and tunnels, catacombs in which grains of sand nest – citrine, bronze, topaz. Seeds of stone in their hatchery.
Around her ankles, tied with a strip of seal hide: a circle of silver birch bark twisted in its drying. Thin ribbons of loose birch-skin rise, quiver, in the tomb’s last breaths; fronds of riverbed life animated by the flow. Tidal, marginal, sifting. Tears in the white veneer glisten around their borders and reveal the flaking inner layers. And around the stump of a lost twig, a translucent mite investigates cracks and fissures with filigree antennae, perfectly at home, already at home. What makes it shine?
Beside her, his folded body, warm, bleeding. Between each of her toes he’s tucked a fin and a feather, and as his grip on the guillemot skull weakens, he threads his little finger into the eyehole. He aims the point of the sable beak at her fin-feathered feet. The guillemot promises to lead the onward journey, now they’re ready to dive, to speak the wish where it must be spoken.