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We can never be with loss too long. Behind the warped door that sticks, the wood thrush calls to the monks, pausing upon the stone crucifix, singing: “I am marvelous alone!” Thrash, thrash goes the hayfield: rows of marrow and bone undone. The horizon’s flashing fastens tight, sealing the blue hills with vermilion. Moss dyes a squirrel’s skull green. The cemetery expands its borders— little milky crosses grow like teeth. How kind time is, altering space so nothing stays wrong; and light, more new light, always arrives.

It seems I get by on more luck than sense, not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood, breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud. I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance. At turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude she counts as daylight virtue and muted evenings, the inventory of absence. But this is no sorry spinster story, just the way days string together a life. Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan. Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry. I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights, singing like only a lucky girl can.

The sun is beginning to go down over a field of yellow onions. The edges of the clouds are almost pink, and at this hour the maguey rises up like a flower of dark blades. I worked so long today I have forgotten my own hunger. It takes a full minute for me to remember a word I have used all my life. What the Mexicans call poncho. At twilight I see it, abandoned, hanging like a ghost on the limb of a tree: my own brown ruana next to gray speckled chickens pecking at roots and a black track of storm coming west over the green mountain.

Force of reason, who shut up the shrill foul Furies in the dungeon of the Parthenon, led whimpering to the cave they live in still, beneath the rock your city foundered on: who, equivocating, taught revenge to sing (or seem to, or be about to) a kindlier tune: mind that can make a scheme of anything— a game, a grid, a system, a mere folder in the universal file drawer: uncompromising mediatrix, virgin married to the welfare of the body politic: deific contradiction, warbonnet-wearing olive-bearer, author of the law’s delays, you who as talisman and totem still wear the aegis, baleful with Medusa’s scowl (though shrunken and self-mummified, a Gorgon still): cool guarantor of the averted look, the guide of Perseus, who killed and could not kill the thing he’d hounded to its source, the dread thing-in-itself none can elude, whose counter- feit we halfway hanker for: aware (gone mad with clarity) we have invented all you stand for, though we despise the artifice—a space to savor horror, to pre-enact our own undoing in— living, we stare into the mirror of the Gorgon.

That dream of a cricket in the dark of the night at the foot of the gallows tree. Virtuous cricket. Little, hopeful heart- shaped face lit up by the moon. Little, hopeful, insistent song about the future sung to a hanged man’s boots.

The drunk mechanic is happy to be in the ditch. From the tavern, five minutes through the dark field and you’re home. But first, there’s the cool grass to enjoy, and the mechanic will sleep here till dawn. A few feet away, the red and black sign that rises from the field: if you’re too close, you can’t read it, it’s that big. At this hour, it’s still wet dew. Later, the streets will cover it with dust, as it covers the bushes. The mechanic, beneath it, stretches in sleep. Silence is total. Shortly, in the warmth of the sun, one car after another will pass, waking the dust. At the top of the hill they slow down for the curve, then plunge down the slope. A few of the cars stop at the garage, in the dust, to drink a few liters. At this time of the morning, the mechanics, still dazed, will be sitting on oil drums, waiting for work. It’s a pleasure to spend the morning sitting in the shade, where the stink of oil’s cut with the smell of green, of tobacco, of wine, and where work comes to them, right to the door. Sometimes it’s even amusing: peasants’ wives come to scold them, blaming the garage for the traffic—it frightens the animals and women— and for making their husbands look sullen: quick trips down the hill into Turin that lighten their wallets. Between laughing and selling gas, one of them will pause: these fields, it’s plain to see, are covered with road dust, if you try to sit on the grass, it’ll drive you away. On the hillside, there’s a vineyard he prefers to all others, and in the end he’ll marry that vineyard and the sweet girl who comes with it, and he’ll go out in the sun to work, but now with a hoe, and his neck will turn brown, and he’ll drink wine pressed on fall evenings from his own grapes. Cars pass during the night, too, but more quietly, so quiet the drunk in the ditch hasn’t woken. At night they don’t raise much dust, and the beams of their headlights, as they round the curve, reveal in full the sign in the field. Near dawn, they glide cautiously along, you can’t hear a thing except maybe the breeze, and from the top of the hill they disappear into the plain, sinking in shadows.

If you open up any atlas and take a look at a map of the world, almost every single one of them slices the Pacific Ocean in half. To the human eye, every map centers all the land masses on Earth creating the illusion that water can handle the butchering and be pushed to the edges of the world. As if the Pacific Ocean isn’t the largest body living today, beating the loudest heart, the reason why land has a pulse in the first place. The audacity one must have to create a visual so violent as to assume that no one comes from water so no one will care what you do with it and yet, people came from land, are still coming from land, and look what was done to them. When people ask me where I’m from, they don’t believe me when I say water. So instead, I tell them that home is a machete and that I belong to places that don’t belong to themselves anymore, broken and butchered places that have made me a hyphen of a woman: a Samoan-American that carries the weight of both colonizer and colonized, both blade and blood. California                          stolen. Samoa sliced in half stolen. California, nestled on the western coast of the most powerful country on this planet. Samoa, an island so microscopic on a map, it’s no wonder people doubt its existence. California, a state of emergency away from having the drought rid it of all its water. Samoa, a state of emergency away from becoming a saltwater cemetery if the sea level doesn’t stop rising. When people ask me where I’m from, what they want is to hear me speak of land, what they want is to know where I go once I leave here, the privilege that comes with assuming that home is just a destination, and not the panic. Not the constant migration that the panic gives birth to. What is it like? To know that home is something that’s waiting for you to return to it? What does it mean to belong to something that isn’t sinking? What does it mean to belong to what is causing the flood? So many of us come from water but when you come from water no one believes you. Colonization keeps laughing. Global warming is grinning at all your grief. How you mourn the loss of a home that isn’t even gone yet. That no one believes you’re from. How everyone is beginning to hear more about your island but only in the context of vacations and honeymoons, football and military life, exotic women exotic fruit exotic beaches but never asks about the rest of its body. The water. The islands breathing in it. The reason why they’re sinking. No one visualizes islands in the Pacific as actually being there. You explain and explain and clarify and correct their incorrect pronunciation and explain until they remember just how vast your ocean is, how microscopic your islands look in it, how easy it is to miss when looking on a map of the world. Excuses people make for why they didn’t see it before.

Extreme exertion isolates a person from help, discovered Atlas. Once a certain shoulder-to-burden ratio collapses, there is so little others can do: they can’t lend a hand with Brazil and not stand on Peru.

The canals of Mars beseech various oxides, vast dust storms of a dulled red, a daytime warmth that only reaches so far. Let’s call these fissures canals so we’ll think of Venice looking through our telescope as Mars comes this close in this our anniversary year with its thin atmosphere and, to be probed, its extreme cold.

Sometimes on a late clear night you can pull that station from Denver or Boston out of the dark. All the elsewheres alter here, as what you remember changes what you think. Not spider nor plum nor pebble possess any of the names we give them. A kite tugging on its string gives you a sense of what's up there, though it is translated, and by a string. Out there, in the dark, the true thing.