Mountains, Myth, and Remembering My Uncle’s Funeral

In this dusk, everything is quiet
or loved. Before light fully wanes
but after I lay face-up in the dirt
all the dogs bark at the same time
every night. They call out to each other,
howl love songs and questions up

into cool air where their bellows
meet the stars pin-pricking the sky
face like silver freckles. In this way
they bark the moon into existence.
A breeze sighs across the reservoir
as the town lowers its shoulders

into the valley. Knowing the water is there
dipped below, deep and rippling, moors me
in a way I never am when landlocked, without
blue periphery. I’m trying to think about
what it means to feel safe—the myths we use,
tell each other in the dark. I will always

be here. Fictions we can’t promise. When he died,
I watched my grandmother drape her small torso
over his coffin, weep into his rigid face—How did this happen?
Why did you let this happen to you? Two questions
buoyed in different grief, but that answer
each other. Fact shattering myth.

The mountains don’t answer
the dogs. Won’t answer anyone.
I have been asking them all day—
how do you do it? How do you withstand
this body? How, I said, when I should
have asked—why.

Sarah Terrazano is a poet whose work appears in The Merrimack Review, Terrain.org, and Poets.org, among others. She is the co-winner of the 2019 Glascock Poetry Contest. Originally from Boston, she now lives in Madrid, where she is pursuing a Master’s degree.