—after William Stafford’s poem, “Traveling through the Dark”

 

Your mother, blinded by the high beams, ran and was hit by a car. She died. But her life continues to flow to you, and you will not lose her before you die. 

Low rumble of the car driving away, then a vast silence. Another car pulling up, a man getting out, dragging her by her legs to the edge of the cliff and pushing her with you inside into the canyon. It was hard for him. He took heart with the strangers’ lives that might be saved, with your mother’s dead body, and, yes, with you. A fawn, a fawn not yet, your legs still tangled up in her belly. With you, motherless—a grief impossible to understand, to be in the midst of its meaning

—you, travelling through your own dark, your face pressed against a wall of taut tissue, listening to your heart beating alone, you yourself making the only sound of your existence, strange and unfamiliar. And you, falling—without knowing what falling is, your legs having never stood upon the ground—free-falling from an unknown height into an unknown night towards the rush of an unknown river.