A Love Letter from a Stray Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

wouldn’t make a home with moonlight: too much blood and silver. He gave me love and home, those two things for which I starved. I came home to his lares and penates , the pre-Columbian statues, and he came home to mine. I found a one-word poem by the fireside. It said ‘hearth’. So I wrote it out in orange, all that a hearth contains. Heat. Art. Eat. Hear. Earth. Heart. What more? Hart. My soul longs for you as the hart yearns for the stream, the psalm says. He left me longing, and this is my Desideratum . I am half-Catholic, after all, and the mother of sorrows has moved into the attic of my mind.
    The years yearned their turnings into love, layer on layer of love laid down in leaves and straw, layers of books re-read, well-loved jokes re-told, boots lovelier with age and use. And for me too he laid layers of love, making tortillas, holding my frightened hand, yelping with glee in the rain, stroking away a headache, cooking me supper, teasing me, enchanting me in glades of twilight, keeping me company in coffee, in toast, in wine, in sadness, in candlelight, in kindness, in carouse, in sobriety, in the most ordinary and therefore the most extraordinary handmade and weatherworn days of home. It was all I wanted, all but.
    I lost a child. I had always imagined that my womb was like a verdant bed of green leaves, glistening, but now I have learned that it’s more of a bomb site, the broken glass and concrete of my shattered pelvis stabbing any tiny baby who tried to nestle a moment there. Bleeding and weeping, I painted that loss. I made history, as he said: ‘Never before had a woman put such agonised poetry on canvas.’
    Everything I love is tied together, and the world is threaded with roots, filaments, fingers, the veins and bloodlines, those ancestral ribbons, tying grandmothers to granddaughters. From life death blossoms, and from death life engraves itself again, but not for me because I am entirely cut from that tapestry now, outside that cycle, further than I can tell you. Those scissors in the hand of La Destina , one scissor blade the tramline crossing the blade of the bus, cut the red ribbons of the generations within me. I could have been not only a mother but a grandmother, and an ancestor too, one who would have shone. I could have been part of life’s veins and promises. La Destina refused.
    I watch my sister now, knowing all her little deaths from which more life comes, but mine is a breathing death, an elliptical life, foreshadowed before my time, lit silver when I want to be green. The vine of the ancestors twists up from earth towards me—two little children who adore me as aunt—and I lean as far as I can without falling, but it is hopeless. The green and the red will never know me now.
    So, then, I have no child and the terror of that loss I cannot face but I have to see it every day and every night, gazing on my sister earth, mother of all that I would love. I circle her, pale and beyond envy for what I cannot have. She has surpassed me in almost every way, in profusion, in plenty; the primordial sculptor. How she is fecund, how she is happy, while I am empty and barren as Lorca’s orange tree. Though I turn the cycles of warm time for all women, I am stuck in a coldness, as if winter had welded itself to the axle of the year and the wheel had stopped turning and spring wouldn’t come.
    I loved her before humanity existed. I grew up with her, nestling planets held in the gravity of love. Earth, my luckier sister, my happier sister, my sister of rivers, my sister of the green-velvet dress, my sister trilling children quicker than you could sing half an aria from The Magic Flute , my sister of sunfuls of warmth, my sister of all fertilities, my wet, wet sister, rich with, oozing with, glistening with. Moisture, life and springingness.
    I am not jealous, I have never been envious. I wish her only more blossom, more oranges, more goats, more children, but my grief