A Love Letter from a Stray Moon Read Online Free

with rings on all my fingers, and I wore Tehuana skirts, embroidered and ribboned, dressing to make my presence defy my exile, to make my beauty defy my pain. At home, every day I made the table into a still life, piling painted bowls full of fruit which the chipmunk tried to snatch, filling clay pots with flowers which the parrot pecked at, displaying the tortillas on decorative plates which the dogs licked while the osprey watched from her perch on my shoulder. Even when I had no appetite, I feasted on the sight.
    I wanted ribbons to tie myself to life. Look at all the ways we are tapestried into life, the delicate intricacy of the threads, vines, tendrils, ropes, tresses, cords, tubes, veins, strings and fingers. Words, too, are tendrils, reaching from my mind to his. I had a thought; a vine of thought curled around my psyche and I wrote to him—an offshoot of the vine—the words transposed into the thread of ink which twists up to his mind, making him smile, his smile a broad line across his face, and he telephones me, the telephone wires such sensitive threads that I can hear him smiling; come over, I said, he came, his quizzical fingers asking questions of mine, yes, my fingers answer, leading his down to the dark jungle vines of my sex, which telegram their delighted replies up to my brain. And after, eyes closed, the air has invisible skeins which link his heart to mine, while beyond me, beyond him, it is the same thread, La Vida , life itself which ties us to every plant, every animal. Under the different surfaces, the same thread of vitality, hence the Aztec prayer: ‘I am the feather, I am the drum and the mirror of the gods. I am the song. I rain flowers, I rain songs.’ And the rest is just painted bread. I am this metamorphosis: I am a deer, I am a mountain, my fingers are vines, and flowers bloom in my hair.
    Once, we arranged to meet at the movies, but the crowd was large and I couldn’t find him anywhere. Then I heard someone whistling the first bar of the ‘ Internationale ’ and immediately I whistled the second bar and stopped, my face gleeful; he whistled the third, I the fourth and so on until we found each other. The ‘ Internationale ’. The entire world. If I say he became the entire world to me, what does that mean? That everything I touch is him, everything I see is him. The colour of sky is him, the sound of the accordion and the blue guitar, the spikes of cactus, and the smell of cloves in the pillowcases is him.
    He drew his hands around me, catscradling me without touching me, in strands of invisible silk, casting spells of protection and painting the air with strange patterns of healing, holding me as if I was an Aeolian harp and, without touching the strings, with his breath he sang my strings to song. I heard Orpheus those nights when we fucked, knuckled together like a chestnut while our eyes were bright like nutshine in the bedding leaves of the woods.
    If there were too many clouds, he tore them down, Prospero to the task, a simple trick of the light, a conjury of the sun, because he was a wonder-worker, thaumaturge. I have watched him make matter out of dream, like the day when he pasted a rainbow on the sky because it was looking a bit bleak. He transformed realities, going under them to the poetics beneath, and under the poetics the physics, and under the physics the transmuting energies, that sound, for instance, can alter matter (and how he was a whistler of worlds), and always, though, under the transmuting energies, was the sweetest alchemy of love for all things. From soil he learned the truths of love and in the earth of his own heart he knew what slender epistles the seedlings write, appealing to the sun, and what need the human soul may have at different seasons, the greenhouse now, the prairie then, the dagger mountain from time to time.
    So conjure me starlight, Prospero, and I will wear it like a jacket. Take a cloud, sewn with blossom, and