In the rocky ride along the desert updrafts rising out of El Paso’s dust brown grid of spotted landscape and ditch of a river—the Rio Grande a concrete spillway of still brown water edged with barbed wire, surveillance roads and fuel oil farms; my death fear constituted itself as it has increasingly lately in the mortality we all share. Everyone here will one day die I find myself thinking, and the realization brings with it an unbearable fondness for us all, a melancholy longing to comfort and be comforted. Looking at the tanned ankle of the girl across the aisle, her leg pulled up under her as she gazes out the cabin window, her prominent ankle bone a rounded knob beneath smooth brown flesh, thought such mortality should be worshipped among us, the ankle sucked like a displaced breast, not out of fetish or fantasy but to honor its sad mortality and present beauty, kneeling in the aisle, tongue round this mesa, cheek against the cooling plain. I had the brief feeling, also increasingly common, that I do not fear death (just as I think I no longer have great hopes but rather sweet quotidian ones, seemingly achievable). At that instant the plane thumps and abruptly rocks with a thermal and I wonder if we really faced a crash and I began to feel the inevitable final fear and anguish whether that really would refute the lack of fear now at its prospect. Somewhere a dim memory of melony peach light over small hills of an opposite shore coloring the cobalt river of twilight seen from a train window. Once, jogging, recalled my mother’s plump and freckled breast.
Suckling everything: this is how it will be to die.