The man in the moon kept witness, after midnight, after the neighbors had gone to their quiet quilted beds: I stepped barefoot off the back porch and into our yard. I was half-naked, half-dreaming, intending to skinny-dip and hoping to slough off the dead cells of these dying days (have I told you? my father is dying)—but she was already waiting for me at the iron gate. A possum and her babies. Gilt by the sulfur light. She gave me a warning look. She said without making a sound, This is primordial choreography; This is all I know.

I’m slogging through the years, stealing paragraphs and abandoning others, and it’s fun and humbling and something I should have done a long time ago. More ancient updates coming soon!

He comes from the city of orphans and smog, built overnight and abandoned again, its empty factories standing now like the ransacked mausoleums of ancestral giants. There are no stars. There are no freight trains for a hundred miles and so he walks along the railroad tracks just before dawn, drunk and dreaming of the desperate laughter of whores; they smell of rosewater and burnt almonds and whisper things to him he cannot understand, but the sounds themselves go on reverberating in his skull for the rest of the night: sibilant, carnal, buoyed by the inherited sorcery of women—of sirens who wrecked ships and ruined heroes and made fools of men for thousands of years—

But the sun breaks over the tops of the trees and everything resumes its ordinary color. He stops and takes a leak at the edge of the woods, thinking of Marguerite with her black hair and bitten thumbs, and how the world has lost some elemental danger. There are no goddesses to take him captive. There are only girls and women.

I dream of the swamp and its lonely ghosts. They have moonblown faces and paraffin eyes, melting and hardening and melting again, like the candles that gutter inside the heads of rotting pumpkins. Have you see them? They are thirsty. They do not levitate the way I thought they would, but drag their feet across the mud and muck and rotten leaves. There are rumors of who they were and how they died: confederate soldiers who camped out here, in their pup-tents and mildewed clothes, nursing rotten limbs and eternal erections, dying from the heat, from boredom, from the absence of all tender life—but it doesn’t really matter. Understand that they’re dead. Understand that this place is haunted.

December ??, 1937
Oaxaca

———Day: and once again, the cruel splendor of a glowering star: hot and molten, blazing across the road and through the dusty curtain into the cloistered shadows of a room where, commingled with its plangent rays, sound all of the voices of the world: boys eating chocolate skulls, the horses in the road, the carts and marketplace and, maybe, possibly, somewhere across the stony paths, the sound of ¡Feliz Navidad! and your voice, if it’s your voice, carried on the back of a mother who walks with her wares, a glass bottle, a hollow chorus. And as if this were not enough, in the afternoon, in the bleeding golden light, the sounds of slaughtering in the kitchen reverberate like so many sharpened knives through the floorboards of my room. I should wait and let them splinter the wood, drive their serrated tips, like the silver narrowed teeth of feeding sharks, through my feet and fingers and throat. I should let them sever the nerves or cut out my liver; I am already a dead Prometheus, flayed and withered on the rocks. …The gods roar in the running water of the faucets, in the liquid that drowns my fever, all sounding like thunder when I submerge my head in the porcelain bath, wrathful, grieving and echoing: you stole the fire; we want it back. The green vulture comes daily through the open window to feast on my organs. He sits perched on the washbasin. He flies at me with his claws poised to tear open my flesh and then, quietly, terribly, his cold beak buries itself inside the putrid cavity of my soul.

Do you wonder how I am? This was our room, once, if you remember, in Oaxaca, with the slaughtering sounds then muted by the grace of your body and your eyes and Oh, Yvonne. I am utterly alone. I try to write, telegrams and letters, on sheets of paper that lay like crumpled ghosts in the wastebasket, under the bedsheets, on the stained floors of the cantinas that creak and rattle under the weight of the patrons who stumble across its length. I know this is hell. I know this is hell to see your figure in the glass and to realize it is only an illusion: my hand touches nothing but the cool air and the lacquer of this bar that stretches like a thirsty unspooled tongue from one end of the room to the other. In the shadows and noise, there is a woman that weeps. Have you wept for us? Have you wept for your fool of a husband who cannot find his way without you? Come back to me, Yvonne. Y. The first letter of your name and and and, repeating in my skull, the necessary fulcrum, the only conjunction: how can we live apart?

—The woman beside me weeps for her lost son, Cristobal, shot, one year ago, in this same cantina. Is Mexico dead? Is the world asleep? I stumble out into the darkness, the somber night, a somnambulator lost in a field of shuttered stars. How much time has passed? Has it been days or weeks? Not months, I know, it is still December. The roads here are steep and crowded with houses, perpetually leaning towards each other, dreaming of touching their leaky roofs and swollen gutters, if only for a moment…

And then today the beggars touched my coatsleeve on the road. I brushed them away and wandered into a garden that wasn’t mine and fell asleep among the weeds. Something had eaten the flower-heads. I dreamed that I was already dead: my face pressed against the soil: a swarm of insects suddenly teeming over my body and feasting upon my face. The locusts took my eyes—the fine pupil and crescent of lid and quivering optic nerve. And this is how I sometimes think of myself: a corpse in a stranger’s garden, faceless, a brood of insects fastidiously consuming the carcass, piece by piece, hair by hair, while scorpions dance in a venomous parade along my torso and a river of cockroaches descend, one by one, their antennae waving, into the spirals of my ear: a stranger, an exiled corpse, dissolving into the dirt. ——I cannot sleep without seeing the volcanoes. They are opened veins spewing forth the lava of their blown cores: invisibly, furtively, for anyone who gazes at their flat black crowns imagines they are dormant. It is not so. I am aware of some imminent explosion. I am roiling glowing mass, set ablaze and burning, for you…your face. If you ever loved me, come back. I am lying in a valley, under the volcano, about to be buried and waiting to be found.

I. Anticipatoria

Imagine an island made of ash—cooled lava that yawns like a black sea before you, cracked and crevassed, hardened now but not forever. You might walk a good distance, a mile or so, looking for some sign of life, and sometimes you will find it. I saw an ancient woman with her dog once—a hideous hairless dog with yellow teeth and bugged-out eyes nervously shaking in the woman’s hands—and I asked her something (I don’t remember what), and she turned her head to face me, so slowly, quietly, that I thought whole universes might have collapsed and been born again in the time it took for her to make that subtle gesture, but of course on other planets it might have only been a single second. That is the first thing you learn about this place—time is an untamed creature. There is no formal curvature of space, no patterned fabric or universal law, and so you forget how to tell a story. Time itself is flattened, bloated, twisted, bent, stretched and swallowed, doubling and redoubling back upon itself, until the beginning seems like a dream you imagined once and the end is an invisible ghost. But the woman—the one with the dog—she said, “I can’t believe it. I forgot to bring toothpaste. I forgot those little bottles of travel shampoo.”

“But you remembered your dog,” I said.

“Yes,” she said and gripped him even tighter to his chest. The thing shivered. “But he’s leaving soon.”

In the distance you could see the blown top of the volcano, with its jagged edges like a broken tooth, beginning to belch fat clouds of steam that signaled its coming eruption. But how long did we have? I had not found my father yet. I had been told (in another life, in another galaxy it seemed to me then) he would be taken away by the molten river, dissolved, returned to the dust and the ash—and this was the waiting, the waiting, the waiting. The sickening knowing dread.

They told their wives, It’s probably nothing, as they sat at the edge of their beds just before dawn and pulled on their boots. All over town, the wives rolled over and touched the empty spaces where their husbands had lain—the sheets still warm, the pillows still dented from the backs of their oily heads. Lawrence, the wives said. Jackson, Philip, Earl. This was their calling song—the husband’s name, spoken dreamily and half-whispered, as the men went to the closets and pulled their shirts down from wire hangers. Where are you going?

The men looked back at their women—in their nightgowns and robes, nipples peeking tenderly through the fabric, eyes crusted with sleep—and they wondered what the Wheeler girl saw, if it really was a body, and if so, if it was the body of a man or a woman. It made a difference somehow. Somehow one was worse than the other. They cleared their throats. They felt protective. They turned off the lamps on their nightstands, leaned over, and kissed their wives goodbye.

She was an aerial blazing comet—hurtling with a determined velocity through the vast coldness of space, around the astral bodies and spiraling diamond galaxies, their arms outstretched, reaching, curving toward her as if to grasp her body, as if to draw her towards their centrifugal suckling mouths: the stellar nursery, the infant nebulae, the birthplace of planets and moons and other earths, less beautiful, less lonely, blooming now with the verdurous ecstasy of a newly minted soul.

She flew past the clusters of constellations, the lines between their points suddenly drawn clear in the darkness, vivid and bright and knowing—each shape becoming clearer, their flat edges suddenly bearing dimension and weight, the volume of a being. She watched the bears and centaurs and southern cross come unhinged from their fixed points and she gathered her favorite stars and stuffed them in the pocket of her dress. …Her fingers were made of a million burning suns, effervescent, tingling and pulsating, and she reached out her hand to touch the cold mud of a gray planet. She felt a shiver in her gaseous spine, sparkling, glittering, and broke apart the terrestrial plates to form separate continents of her own. Pangaea dead, her first murder, and she scraped at the raw dirt until her nails bled and the edges were formed: new shores, new oceans. A continent has no countries, she thought, peripherally, before there are people’it is all a single rolling place.

She strode easily, gracefully, down the side of her creation, feeling her feet haphazardly creating the valleys and the mountains and the soft swamps of lower ground. She cleaved handfuls of rock with her teeth and touched her finger to the shavings, alighting them and making them spin in the air, metamorphic beads: turning bright: to wood, to grass, to blood and human bone. She felt herself grow smaller. She looked over her bare shoulder, across the valley, beyond the mountain, under the twisting breaking clouds, but she was alone. She felt the earth stretch higher and higher above her, wild and unkempt, and before she lost the beautiful blazing thrust of a comet’s arm, she flung the stars in her pocket back up into the theater of space.

She felt, then, the notches of her spine click into place: hardened and connected, no longer the buoyant tissue of an astral body: she was mortal; she was a woman in a nightgown, sweating and turning in her sleep, reaching her arms out in the darkness of an unknown room, clutching the air, touching without feeling the fine gradients of moonlight.

There is so much color. So much disorientation (the walk out of a saturday matinee). So much crystalline preservation, remodeled phrases, premeditated holding–so many spontaneous shifts and subtle nuances. So much doubt and so much security–the paradoxical vulnerability and simultaenous strength.

Impossible to see objectively: water is suddenly brighter, words suddenly more heavy (tactile and olfactory now–with layers behind layers–is nothing superficial?). The multiplication of laughter. Ordinary things are suddenly beautiful. Doubts birthed and slaughtered in a matter of minutes. This indescribable paradise that runs alongside this perilous edge.

who am I but the withered stem or forgotten root or the deft pencil scratching (to the throat or the purple vein or the blood that coagulates in the well of your achilles’ blister).

who am I but the frost on a windowsill, gathering in the flux of minutes and the pubescence of autumn and the scratching sound of wind on wood. mitigating silence, in the lunar room of prehistoric demolition.

who am I but the two eyes that watch and feel and taste. the tin roof rusted over with orange pockmarks, spreading outward from their centers of speckled red. the metallic fire.

I know not or think not but feel much more than the articulate language can articulate.

I know things you forget in the separated colors of light: the spectroscope that we aim at fluorescence, one eye winked shut, the other open, looking for the thin striped rainbow.

who, but the crystallized voice, frozen in the instance that was never there. the instance that regenerates itself in the death of a cell or the birth of an eyelash or the memory of a forgotten boy.

the simple crux, the kaleidoscope that takes a thing and multiplies it and reflects it shape until there is that bright variegated, angular, and confusing set of shapes that are the same and different all at once.

a pattern repeats itself to never be repeated agian.

who, but myself. on this night. at this hour. in this moment of time.