Equator Sky, Manila Bay

Here, the brightest constellation is Hydra, the Water Snake, named for the half-woman, half-reptile whom Hercules slew with the help of  Iolaus, his charioteer. Imagine the sound of so many heads screaming — the long, shrill bays of an angry woman times twenty — and the smell of birth, of all origins, that followed Hydra as she rose from her fetid swamp. Iolaus was strategic, went straight for the bowels instead of the mouth, burned her center before the head. When her fundament was reduced to ash, only then could Hydra be silenced. Hera, enraged that Hercules was able to slay the creature she had raised in order to destroy him, flung the corpse of the decapitated, maimed Hydra into the sky, lest she be forgotten. Hydra’s blood, unstoppable, became hot gas; her screams rose and fell until they were radio waves; and her wild flailing was fixed into points of radiance. Hera was right to hurl those stars here, above this bay, so close to where the earth is bisected, a place where Hydra’s mirror image glosses the water, where dense blooms of  algae flourish on the nitrogen surface, thousands of wild heads and arms devouring ammonia, cyanide, and sewage as fast as we can produce them, this hydra, emblem of insatiable desire.