The Glass and the Bowl
The father pours the milk from his glass into the cup of the child, and as the child drinks the whiteness, opening her throat to the good taste eagerly, the father is filled. He closes the refrigerator on its light, he walks out under the bowl of frozen darkness and nothing seems withheld from him. Overhead, the burst ropes of stars, the buckets of craters, the chaos of heaven, absence of refuge in the design. Yet down here, his daughter in her quilts, under patterns of diamonds and novas, full of rich milk, sleeping. Louise Erdrich