Shooting Star

1    In a concussion, the mind severs the pain: you don’t remember flying off a motorcycle, and landing face first in a cholla. But a woman stabbed in her apartment, by a prowler searching for money and drugs, will never forget her startled shriek die in her throat, blood soaking into the floor. The quotidian violence of the world is like a full moon rising over the Ortiz mountains; its pull is everywhere. But let me live a life of violent surprise and startled joy. I want to thrust a purple iris into your hand, give you a sudden embrace. I want to live as Wang Hsi-chih lived writing characters in gold ink on black silk— not to frame on a wall, but to live the splendor now. 2    Deprived of sleep, she hallucinated and, believing she had sold the genetic research on carp, signed a confession. Picking psilocybin mushrooms in the mountains of Veracruz, I hear tin cowbells in the slow rain, see men wasted on pulque sitting under palm trees. Is it so hard to see things as they truly are: a route marked in red ink on a map, the shadows of apricot leaves thrown in wind and sun on a wall? It is easy to imagine a desert full of agaves and golden barrel cactus, red earth, a red sun. But to truly live one must see things as they are, as they might become: a wrench is not a fingerprint on a stolen car, nor baling wire the undertow of the ocean. I may hallucinate, but see the men in drenched clothes as men who saw and saw and refuse to see. 3    Think of being a judge or architect or trombonist, and do not worry whether thinking so makes it so. I overhear two men talking in another room; I cannot transcribe the conversation word for word, but know if they are vexed or depressed, joyful or nostalgic. An elm leaf floats on a pond. Look, a child wants to be a cardiologist then a cartographer, but wanting so does not make it so. It is not a question of copying out the Heart Sutra in your own blood on an alabaster wall. It is not a question of grief or joy. But as a fetus grows and grows, as the autumn moon ripens the grapes, greed and cruelty and hunger for power ripen us, enable us to grieve, act, laugh, shriek, see, see it all as the water on which the elm leaf floats. 4    Write out the memories of your life in red-gold disappearing ink, so that it all dies, no lives. Each word you speak dies, no lives. Is it all at once in the mind? I once stepped on a sea urchin, used a needle to dig out the purple spines; blood soaked my hands. But one spine was left, and I carried it a thousand miles. I saw then the olive leaves die on the branch, saw dogs tear flesh off a sheep’s corpse. To live at all is to grieve; but, once, to have it all at once is to see a shooting star: shooting star shooting star.