To turn that god merely animal. To render

instinctual his greed, to make of him a man

barely culpable, so that we might command

a tale that only pleases us: there is no terror

in it, glossing over the sliced-out hole

in the family photos, the missing child

whose pain goes unremarked, silenced by a bolt

of lightning or the shriek of an eagle, its counter-

feit wings snatching a boy out of his life,

then making that boy serve him, forever.

As if a life could be defined by wound, sorrow

impelled only by desire—

I lay claim

to your private history, and by doing so chain

you once more to silence, my imagination

of your pain figured through my body, transforming

you to a self I might fathom. I wanted to mourn

how some do not survive so much as endure

what’s forced on them, the heart’s warm

muscle refreshed for the god that feeds

eternally on violence. Instead, I find myself

nursing the belief your wounds kept you

from hurting me. What you sensed, what I hated:

some part of me loved you, not in spite of,

but because you had been raped.

What will make these unearthed

fragments whole? Up close, the king’s foramen

magnum is a sinkhole: nothing more than

variants where bone buckles, mimics Earth’s

geologic shifts, its calcite scrapes

of shale, escarpments where the hair, a paste

of muds, has since flaked off. His cheek blades

are sheared to tusk tips. Broken by a spade

that crushed him where he lay,

he’s shattered. A man to be returned in parts:

mined like a seam of crushed quartz, needles of bone

sharp as the points on a porcelain star.

So exposed when cleaned, arrayed, he almost glows

like the Dovre capped with a sugar-crust of snow.

Our first night, you pulled my dress

over my hips, tugging its green velvets

down. How I wish it was your mouth you’d let

be wetted with kisses: your shoulders pressed

to the bed, pearl lilies trapped behind glass.

Your rock-rose, pale flames

burning beneath my palm, you the tree

bursting into flower, you the bird

finally taking wing. I wish I could have made

our bodies one only of delight, never of suffering.

I wish that ivy dress had come softly twining

to our feet as we grafted ourselves into one

another: my slow blush ripening between us as

something in us both, finally, opened.

Somewhere grief’s oceanic murmur sounds:

the faint snap of linen sails, or the prayers of mourners

hungry for ritual. I imagine your fingers

scrolling these hieroglyphs carved in rounds

through Gokstadt’s keel: an untranslatable lace

of beasts and love knots, maps of borders,

the king’s own scrawled, brutal wars turned

quaint and historical. Their violence erased

by our disuse of such symbols, deadened

by the fact these words no longer represent us.