Sharon Whitehill
Missing Pieces
Surely a mythical creature, the starfish: what looks like
a skullcap crawling along the sea floor on its lips,
with nary a torso or tail. Osiris’s wicked brother
chops his body to pieces and scatters the parts in the Nile—
a transgression peculiarly heinous when afterlife access requires
that even a god be physically whole. Losing a piece, a sea star
regrows the appendage; from that one lost arm an entire
new creature sometimes evolves. Absent such cellular magic,
the loss of human parts can be what permits the renewal,
as in surgeries to save my daughters: one with breast cancer,
the other with uterine tumours. Isis collects every piece of Osiris
except for his phallus, consumed by a fish—what better way
to convey the fall of a fertility god? Some female starfish flirt
with a form of dismemberment, splitting in half to become
a male pair who turn female again when mature. The illusion
of safety, so vital to human function and purpose, is easily shaken.
Late at night, when I’m waiting alone after the airport has emptied,
my husband appears at last like an angelic vision: a resurrection,
of sorts, of our life together. Isis reassembles her husband,
fully equipped through her magic, embalms him, wraps his body
in linen—thereafter the rites that reanimate dead Egyptians
as mummies. In my own life, no mythical sorcery or echinoderm
alchemy to restore a lost limb, a disappeared loved one, a self.
Rather, only postponement, the holding of loss in abeyance.
Which seems to me magic enough.