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Authors: Jay Griffiths

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A Love Letter from a Stray Moon (6 page)

BOOK: A Love Letter from a Stray Moon
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There are revolutionaries who dream of bullets and revolutionaries who dream of starlit guitars, on nights when the moon is all you have left to call your own. Tuck the moon into your saddlebag, then, with pipe tobacco, balloons and poems whose fuses are already lit, ready to explode like shooting stars on the skies of ten thousand minds. But all of this is in the future, all yet to come. In my present, I can only tell you that the cords of Lorca's harp were cut with scissors, that my heart fell, the chords of my heart falling down through the octaves below the range of human hearing.

Diego divorced me, and I divorced him. I was entirely bewildered but still entirely in love. But in the terrible confusions of love, there was an eclipse of the moon. How did it happen? Astronomers of the heart could explain it like this: I couldn't take the pain. The loneliness of being flung out of his orbit made me demented for solace. I am a stray moon, and I would swing into the orbit of any consoling planet. So the moon was eclipsed by a passing star. I became exiled not only from him but from myself, and that was my one unforgivable sin, which I regret so bitterly now, because it was a fall from my own grace. I was fatally eclipsed, and I swung away from the truth of my own trajectory. My mind was born winged, but that was the one moment when I betrayed the gift of flight. The best of minds stay faithful to their flight, the wise women, the world's shamans whose transformations are flights of empathy, of curiosity, of curing; whose translations are innocent; who dared to be innocent, who dared to fly, who chose their own soaring. I was unfaithful to my own flight.

What does it mean to fly? To dare to dream. To be deeply, highly happy. And to be innocent above all. I am guilty. I lied to him, pretending I wasn't having affairs. But I lied also to myself, and I misaligned my soul. It is so easy to be guilty, like a goat tethered by an old piece of washing line to a cacky post. It is harder to be innocent. But courage is innocent and now is innocent and desire is innocent and flight is an innocent angle of yearning, aspiring to express the life force, and now I see his eyes shining with flight. Icarus soared, flying in the face of god and gravity. What matters is not that he was forced to fall but that he dared to fly.

Passion above all is innocent. Passion is the very wingedness of innocence, the finest advocate and the only one necessary. In feral tenderness, loving him, cock and cunt, the moon will not be patrolled and she shines free and fearless and there is no sin in anything that shines that fucking much.

I became only more beautiful for being so bruised. I would be a conquistador of pain. I painted myself masturbating and I dared the press to say so. One did. I was all the opulence of Byzantium, and all the spider monkeys of the rainforests. I was saucier than any tart. Like a nutcracker, I cracked jokes till the guests spluttered with laughter like the chestnuts I forgot in the fireplace, exploding like little bombs all over the room. Like, like, like, everything was like everything else. Except him.

I put my special diamond and gold caps on my incisors so I glinted wickedly in three places. Eyes. Teeth. Cunt. It's a display, that's all. The reality is that I hold my own hand, I cry, I drink, I sleep. Skeletons in sunglasses, skeletons in goggles tell dirty jokes around my broken bed until vines and tendrils spring up from my pillows, surrounding me in jungle, my death giving them
fuerza de la natura
. The force of nature: from death comes life. Everything is connected in life, everything spins me into it. There are caterpillars caught in a web which a spider has spun between a green leaf and my black hair. (‘Black? Nothing is black, really
nothing
,' I wrote.)

We had a party one day and dressed the cardboard skeletons, some in my clothes, some in his, and hung them from the rafters so there was an alternative fiesta up there; in the commotion the skeletons jostled and swayed and gossiped of the dead and cast the glad eye with their empty sockets and drank shots of tequila through their jawbones.

Enchanting man, he was endlessly enchantable, it welled up, a spring which never ran dry. He was enchanted by dawn and by dusk, every leaf enchanted him, every moment, every river, every tune, every pipe, every wave, every moonrise, every woman. The earth gods enchanted him—as did Jesus, that lovely magician, who shared so many motifs with all the other earth gods, the death and resurrections, the turning worlds of life, death and life again. All of these deserved his enchantment, and were enchanted by him in turn because he was so open-hearted, so free with himself, that flowers crowded flirting into his fingers, rivers nuzzled their courses nearer to him, and for him the stars tripped over the Andes and fell shooting from the sky in the instantaneity of stellar love. He gave himself to the world and the world flooded in to him in turn.

White feathers fall across my window as another sky surrenders.

Do I mind?

Why should I? Like van Gogh, I stand in my own light.

And besides, everything that was ever created loves me. Moth, jaguar, sap. They rise to greet me and I suppose I need none of him, but I am saddened when I see the rainforests choked and rainless. The whales which used to sing for me are scarcer and more silent now. The ice seeps away—the ice which was my favourite landscape—for I was an artist of light before he was born, and I gave ice the brightness of sheer serenity. My sadness now is a cloud around me which I shine within, and no light of mine is seen by anyone else, creating a further exile.

Do I mind?

My soul is broken.

I will have to make shift for myself on the heath of my soul, knowing myself broken to bits and pieces, knowing a howl of utter and lifelong pain. Put out the lights. Put out the moonlight and the suns and stars and then put out mindlight everywhere. This is the Age of Yellow: madness, sickness and fear. How could I have turned from him? How could I? How?

But he did not want me any more. After millennia of tenderly cherishing moonlight, he took the moon out of his pocket and dropped it. So mind, too, slipped out of his fingers and fell on the floor: thought in shards.

And I walked away inconsolable till Walt Whitman whistled to me from the woods. You look like one of mine, he said, and hugged me.

I asked him, are we too few, we of the poet's vintage? Are there simply too many of the others? Those who do not prize either poetry or flight. Who re-cork the bottle before we've finished drinking. Who are a herbicide to the idiosyncratic and a pesticide to difference. Who buy pasteurised verbs and keep them in the fridge, who check their hearts are sterilised, and who, seeing the very liquidity of love, would only handle it with rubber gloves. Who keep the garbage foil-wrapped for freshness but think a vegetable garden is dirty. Who think the volcanic is just another reason for dusting. Who like to titter but never really laugh. Who buy cut-price emotions, a bargain in the marketplace. Who are sociable enough to gather gossip but not kind enough for friends. Who keep their cash safe but freely betray a confidence. Who use their shallowness to scorn profundity. Whose incuriosity closes minds and books and conversations. Who never knew bewilderment or what it was to wonder. Whose self-certainty was as cruelly clean as their curtains, and as surely sterile. Who aimed for the average and scored it competently, who know ambition but not aspiration. Who opt for the ordinary and would sue a bird for singing.

Surrealism. They need it in Europe, I suppose. Their Aztecs are so buried that they need drowned clocks instead. My parrots and monkeys ransack the garbage for real, and jaguars roar from my bookshelves, so why should I look for dream puppeteers?

My Changeling Child in
a World Mad with
Grief

I
know Diego of old. I know how his infidelities are a result of his generosities and I know it is who he is. I have watched him a long time, I have loved him, reproached him, hated him and adored him and I think, after all these years, I know him, all his nonsenses, his creations, mistakes and wonders, all his wrong turnings, wit, mischiefs and glories.

But what he did next shocked me more deeply than anything yet.

It was the Day of the Dead and I had taken my sister's children out to the graves which were lit with lanterns and candles, and we ate tiny candy skeletons in their miniature sugar coffins. A merry death day it was, and the children were effervescent and giggly and I held them precious to my heart while we strew
zempazúchil
flowers across the graves and they tipped handfuls of petals into my hair and kissed me and called me
mamá
by accident. For one moment, then, my stomach heaved with grief, knowing that no child now would ever call me mother except by mistake. But the moment passed, and they told me saucy jokes, and we flicked sugar skulls into each other's mouths until the night grew late. We left, turning for home, and burst into the house, the kids fizzing with coffins and candlelight and there was Diego, fucking their mother, my sister.

No pain like it.

No time in hospital, having my bones re-broken, hurt like this.

My sister, my fertile sister, my sister of cradles, not coffins.

I cut off all my hair, as an outward sign of what he had done. I was shorn of what little I had. Take my sister, take my hair, take my sex, leave me only my coffin.

I had just about learned to laugh at the physical pain, the fracture of my pelvis and my broken back, the endless rounds of surgery, being caged in a hospital bed, but the moment I had almost managed to cope, he fractured my heart, making of me an Aztec sacrifice. I was still alive, goddammit, he could have waited. My body was
chingada
—it was fucked—and now my psyche was too. I paint in the poetry of blood and my blood feeds the earth to bloom and to blossom with art.

My sweet sister-earth. And yet he abused everything about her, her love for him, her patience, her trust. I know he didn't mean to do it, but I see the effects. She is maddened with grief. Her rhythms are ruptured and her seasons sundered. Her eyes are bright with pain. And I am not only heart-broken but soul-broken. I would have stayed faithful to him till I died but, when he turned away from me, in my grief I also turned away from him and in doing so I lost my self. I lost my singularity, my wholeness, my integrity. I have made the seas grieve, those oceans which knew the miracle of chance before, the lucky coral as a lively chaos, now only know the dead chaos which leaves her bruised and jangling, and I've heard the seas shriek with pain as a terrible magenta covers the oceans already with the heave of a lifelong grief.

The seas no longer sway with me, but instead they bolt and stagger, they run cold currents where warm should be, measuring the rise of their grief in metres, overflowing with strange tears, as sea levels rise, flooding miles of coast and submerging whole islands. Hurt, the world's waters rage, impotent for the most part but hurling an occasional tsunami of reproach. My gentle ocean is inconsolable and infinite in grief. The coral is bleached, the dugong is butchered and the songlines of the whale are so skewed that one, injured, distressed and disoriented, swum not singingly in the bell depths of the Atlantic but turned right at Casablanca and creaked its confused way to die by the Rock of Gibraltar.

I am in constant cloud now, all passion spent, I withdraw to lifelessness, grey and empty in a silent shroud.

I paint myself in a double portrait, one of me cut open on a hospital trolley under a searing sun. The other is proud under the full moon. ‘Tree of hope, keep firm,' is the banner I hold in my hand. What trees now? Sweetheart, it was in the Amazon that we met, centuries before we were even lovers, there that your gaze swam with intelligence, and I laughed at all your jokes and said,
por favor cuidar este jaguar
. Please look after this jaguar. Meet me then in that
now
again, and again watch the carousel of the sky and, from that turning world pick me, choose me: ‘I'll have that one,' and hold me to that warm plump chest.

Life allows so few loves like this. Once, maybe, and if you're very lucky twice in a life, often none at all.

But the Amazon will die of thirst, she will seize up with a drought. An arrow, a feather, an abandoned village of thatched huts, a wizened, drunk old man, crying in a language no one else can speak, crumpled with insatiable memory. One island nation, five atolls and four islands, pacific and named by doves, Tuvalu, is silently submerged as the quiet waters lap its shores, past the fishing boats, up its beaches, up, to the houses at the coastline, on, on, the gentle sea, the sea murmuring in quiet amazement at itself, on, until the centre where it can see itself coming, reflecting its rise, it meets itself in a full circle of embrace and Tuvalu will only be a story of mythic islands beneath the waves.

The opposite death, too, I can see from here, as deserts cauterise my beloved Mexico, I see people's lips dry and cracked, twitching as the vultures soar. I am parched already, but now Mexico is too, and from the plains of Mexico I see people fleeing, driven over the Rio Grande, risking the bullets at the razor wire. Choose your death, a slow death of thirst, or fast as a bullet.

BOOK: A Love Letter from a Stray Moon
7.19Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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