Kryptonite & Cookies

I sit here at my desk watching the silver dollar moon turn the desert tundra into a shadowy, dusty blue that presages the earthshaking steps of giants. It also looks like the snowfields are an expanding inland sea that will lap at my windows, turning my house with its huge windows into an aquarium. And that is how I feel inside my head, water sloshing and soaking, dousing, suffocating. La luna, I love her, and she is also my kryponite. Triple fire I am, and she the moon, closer to me than she's ever been, has slipped me a mickey, shaken me when I needed stirring, dropped a depth charge in my super food. It happens every time, month-to-month, more and more, and, although I can fight it with the determination of the Man of Steel or Captain Kirk, really I am reduced to the desire to crawl on a padded floor, to some corner filled with pillows where I can burrow my head and wiggle my shoulders before sinking into the floor of a deep slumber. My feet are vibrating inside my boots, my lips loose and slightly opened, my ears ringing in a high C, my heart beating in my armpits. I am not heavy, but disintegrating, changing states, solid to liquid. I want to run out of myself and flow without effort, give up to my mistress who excites me with her grand entrance, the light preceding her behind Taos Mountain as if she has an army spread across the San Luis Valley holding up flood flights and pointing them south toward the Taos Range. I imagine the people of this vast valley, in the hills, mountains, out on the mesa like me, running to their east windows like trained mice and making noises, ooohs and ahhhhs, and then moving across their houses to other windows as La Luna climbs higher and turns the knock knock world into the realm of the stainless steel knights, blowtorch blue, riding their hard-snorting black steeds, trailing serpents of vapor from wet nostrils; ghosts of the old ways, of all the races that have spilled on this dirt. And we know this world, we know it, and some of us are drawn outside by a red thread pulling from just below the navel, into the snow, the temperature down to 10 deg., just as in a dream, when you're not sure you want to go, but your astral body is hitched to what is out there, the red thread upon touching the moonlight revealed as a silver lariat comprised of three interwoven strands that undulate into the dancing charcoal dust floating above the snow. A thundering is felt just above and below where you strain to hear, and in it are all of the things, the people, the hopes and strivings and, above all, the knowings, the wisdom, and the Great Need to bow to and embrace what is "out there" so that you can go back inside, the red thread returned, enter the bed and learn again to swim.

And I am going to do just that.

But before I crawl away, I want to say that a little girl, dark haired with gigantic round chestnut eyes, and a pearl button nose, maybe 4, maybe 5, came to my table at the Mondo Kultur Cafe. Her mom was just getting off of work, and the little girl and her redheaded, freckled friend were going to eat cookies. The place was packed, all tables filled, but many, like mine, with single people spreading out over a table for 2 or 4. This little one, without hesitation, pulled out the chair next to me, looked me in the eyes with the presence of a tree, and told me without words everything I needed to know. She sat on the chair (on her knees) and patted the seat of the chair next to her for her friend to come sit. I was madly in love with this little person treating me like a fellow tree exhaling oxygen into the world. Me and her, just trees hanging in the same forest. And then her mother called her, not angry, but with firmness and fear, looking at me with apology. And I said, "No, no, it's okay. They can sit here with me, I'm just reading." "No, no," she said, "we're going to go." The little tree got off of her chair and pushed it back in then looked at me and said in a froggy voice, "Thank you, we're going to eat the cookies in the car." And she smiled a little tree smile that made me happier than I've been in a long, long time.