A: death


Ebolia: crimson pollen all around us and at the center of a sea of red a red tide crawling inward chasing all the creatures scuttling to their death before it and the heat spreads into a swelling ocean of molten iron, fire red, sand red, rash red, sky red, even blue is red, and everywhere the metallic taste of sunlight and the sea salt, tongue swollen to a dry red wad, constant choking. O where was it? once with Susan Suchman we camped on a movie set along a molten seaside in Mexico– catch 22: a night without breeze, the mosquitoes so thick they drove us into the mildewed stifling sleeping bags ears still buzzing with the buzzing bloody creatures, the whole seashore along the simulacrum macadam airstrip writhing with hot and angry bodies, fucking, fucked (not us), hallucinating with the heat, turistas, or bad drugs, moaning and bitten beyond belief, and in the morning bellies and hollows throbbing in a network of red mottle and the dry nipples of the bare breasted hippie women shrunken stark and unappealing in the already searing light of dawn along the filthy beach. No refreshment, not even the sea. (Making our way there along twenty miles of desert glare in the airless car, head throbbing, nostrils dry as slate, looking for somewhere outside the sun to stop, a single tree, but not one damp spot of shade until a tent camp of shoreside cantinas and tacquerias where a few sun-dazed mexican drunks in stained trousers and baseball caps sat under the pavilions scratching at their eyes and dicks and staring through Tecate glazed eyes at the locos americanos making their way down to the bay, the incandescent sand searing the soles of our feet through sneakers and sandals, teeshirts gripping the skin as if damp though the perspiration evaporated as soon as it formed, tears turning salt as soon as wept, and every body part itching dry: nipples choke berries, cocks agave worms, cunts dry purses, anuses dry fire–we dreamed of the mucous pulp of jalapenos, limes, tongue, clitoris– and finally reaching the placid water found it hot as the air, dry and unsatisfying, unable to cry. Mad dogs and mid day sun. Behind us the drunks shouting “Puta! Culo! Pato!” in their iguana dry voices.) Elsewhere in the past, as if a ghost, Mike Nichols in an air conditioned trailer gazes through an unfocused lens on the sea, sips gin and tonic with a splash of Rose’s lime. Is that Bach? I tread here once and am once again. What could this mean? Someone help the gunner. Late that night in the zocolo: jugo de naranja and for once mariachi making sense as woman walk their long skirts swaying orchids and the coolness descends and macaws screech in the open windows. Longing for sex and unaware embraced her as we slept in the back of the open station wagon. (Did you know? she asked in the morning. That dry: I did not. You were caressing my breast, she said. I’m very sorry, I said. It’s alright, she said, I was pretty sure you didn’t know.)

The first time I knew a new woman. (My friend’s brother Ray years ago in Newark sneering as I played the cut from the white album. Blackbird fly into the dead of night. You would like that, he said, the voice like poison. Sweet little white boys tell the black man what to do. All you white boys like it like that. Fuck that shit, man. The first time I knew a new black man. African american, ex-Ranger. “We came into Nam that way, man, made us jump into a jungle after the flight from Hawaii, falling down through the air feeling the rising heat of the jungle, watching the sniper tracers cut through the air like snakes, the screaming all around, the air full of screaming brothers and the smell of nuoc nam and white boys shitting their pants in the parachute harnesses. Fuck that shit too, man. The ones who fought their way out found their gear at the airstrip all in a neat stack next to the smiling lieutenant and the body bags for the assholes who didn’t survive the entrance. Coulda landed with that shit along the tarmac and skipped the motherfuckin snipers but that wasn’t the GI way. Into the dead night. Fuck that shit man. Fuck you and your Beatles.” A year later he came to the door where we were sleeping and she went out into the hallway at dawn. At first she was negotiating, real sleepy and flirty, laughing more and more, his whole rap a rhythmic undertone of baby, baby. I heard the sound of her mouth sucking him and his grunts, heard them fuck in the empty vestibule, him grunting as he came, pretended to be asleep as she slipped back into bed, the smell of his aftershave on her neck and breasts, his cum on her thighs. New woman as well.) I’m very sorry, I said. It’s alright, she said, I was pretty sure you didn’t know.

Aporia: My sister-in-law Linda ( I remind you her name means beautiful in Spanish) works as a perfusionist on an open-heart team. She is in charge of the heart-lung machine: “It is very simple,” she says, “If you lose the warmth at the patient's core, she dies. Life and warmth are just that close.”

And yet some diseases invert this. We die of our warmth and slip into the cold. We are never far from the small settlements where we began our nomadic lives. All human kind issuing from a single core: villages in Africa haunt our polar dreams, dry ice searing the bottoms of the feet of the wanderers. The body of chrysalis.