Read A Love Letter from a Stray Moon for Free Online Page A

for another woman but for every other woman. This was his nature.
    All those who are exiled look to me for their primal simile and I am pale with exile’s hunger, having no barley, no hops, no hearthside, no ruddy cheeks. I am sick with an exile’s thirst for the bucketloads, oceanloads of water tipping around in giant puddles on earth. Coatlicue is the goddess of all exiled women, all those who shine with too much silver, goddess of both birth and death, her skirts rattle with skulls as she walks and those skulls shine with moonlight and knowing.
    My exile forced me to be nomadic, limping across the heavens with bare white feet and, since I never wore shoes, after several millennia my feet bled from walking. I leave bloody footprints now across the sky, and I leave bloody footprints on earth, across the world a million bloodstained bedsheets every month, the footprints of my nomadic courses, which is why still today you can see a million women by a million wells at dawn, washing out the bloody footprints of the moon. I am so tired of walking alone. There is a pair of parakeets at the gate, here a family, there a marriage, with a nest of children, and everywhere they lie in twos while I shine with solitude, bright with its utter light.
    But if you look carefully when I am crescent you will see a strange glimmer, the faintest trace of light which only the most observant see at the edge of my circle, the low light of my liminal love, only just visible, only at night, my only intimacy described in shadow terms, like the moon in love with man on the dark side only, on the far and other, the only unlonely side, and only for moments, for when the moon turns a half-inch in her sleep she half-wakes and knows she is alone again, holding herself only in her own arms, morning after night in the bruised edge of the sky.
    The moon was homeless, and how many there were who wanted the moon unhoused, hurt by the road, gypsy of the sky whose freedom they could relish only with envy and admire only with resentment. Oh, the moon’s used to it, she doesn’t need a home, she’s a natural nomad, they said, because they wanted her for a symbol of a life they were too mortgaged to lead. (Lorca knew the sadness of solitude, that gypsy grief, and we console each other. My Mexico understands exile, and has a proud history of giving a home to political refugees.) I am exiled from the simplest dream, to lie on a beach in the sun with my head in his plump lap, to swim naked with him, to hold his hand in a taverna in the evening and at night to feel his breath softly fanning my cunt to flame as one would blow on the embers to catch fire, and I can no more have this than the moon could crawl down a duckboard off the roof, balance her toe on the rainwater butt, and hop down to give you a quick peck on the cheek. So I must turn my face away and sing my solo to the cosmos.
    I painted The Two Fridas , one of me in Tehuana dress, woven into the indigenous earth of Mexico, and the other in European clothes. (We both have hearts too open, and our human hearts are on the left, with its rightful political hint.)
    Indigenous Frida holds a tiny egg-shaped portrait of Diego, attached to her heart by an artery which is also an umbilical cord. European Frida, meanwhile, is bleeding to death.
    For Mexico itself, of course, it is the indigenous lands which are bleeding to death, and The Two Mexicos is the masterpiece being repainted now in the figure of Subcomandante Marcos, fusing the two. One Mexico is traditional and indigenous, speaking the language of land; the other is Western, speaking the urban poetics of the page. The two marry in the Zapatista rebellion of today, and together they write a message in blood from the open veins of Mexico’s heart, for humanity and against neoliberalism, calling all grief-surgeons of the world to help stem the flow.
    I have to tell you, because it makes me smile, that Subcomandante Marcos had a crush on me when