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

he was just a teenager; he loved my revolutionary nature and my art. I died when he was still very young, but I passed the baton on to him. Poet, revolutionary, romantic .
    In the genealogy of revolutionaries, I was fathered by Emiliano Zapata, and I was born in Mexico’s earlier rebellion. In the register of births, Marcos was born during my lifetime but, in the register of revolutionary significance, Marcos says he was born in 1984 as the Zapatista insurgents moved to begin training in the Lacandon jungle. (We are all Zapata. We are all Marcos.)
    I really only have one disagreement with Subcomandante Marcos, and even then it stems from an agreement. We both think that the moon has hope, but whereas he thinks that her hope is to escape her tie to earth, to fly away, maybe to Jupiter or Saturn, I think her hope is to be tied closer and closer by a sweet silk thread to humanity, and that her grief is because of the distance between them. Who is right, Marcos or me? Who knows? Well, without wanting to pull rank on this one—especially against the supreme commander of Mexico’s rebel army—I do. I am the moon, after all, in one of her incarnations. Marcos once planned to send a message, on a little satellite, to the moon, saying: ‘It would do her good to know that someone understands her.’ Yes, and you. It would do you good too.
    â€˜It happened many years ago. It is a story of a love that was not, that was left unfulfilled. It is a sad story…and terrible,’ says the subcomandante , pipe to his lips, eyes to the mountains now. He speaks for himself, for me, and for countless thousands, but beneath one ski-mask is another, beneath the Zapatistas of today, that earlier revolution, when my story began, my sad story and terrible, my story of a love not yet fulfilled.
    Marcos, they say, is the most wanted man in Mexico. I can quite believe it. Women want him hard in bed, eh, Don Durito of the Lacandon? Kids put on ski-masks and want to be him. But a small and horrible bunch of bankers, bureaucrats and soul-murderers want to kill him, not because he is a rebel leader but because he is a poet. To them, I’d say: Be careful. Would you assassinate the moon? All that would happen is you’d shatter her reflection in the lake, scatter it in a thousand pieces. So too, if you murder Marcos, a thousand shiny coins of priceless heroism will put on ski-masks and climb the mountain under a moon of vehement poetry. Like Lorca, the subcomandante writes the poetry of the toreador, and he knows how the bulls of Wall Street have gored the campesinos .
    There are revolutionaries who dream of bullets and revolutionaries who dream of starlit guitars, on nights when the moon is all you have left to call your own. Tuck the moon into your saddlebag, then, with pipe tobacco, balloons and poems whose fuses are already lit, ready to explode like shooting stars on the skies of ten thousand minds. But all of this is in the future, all yet to come. In my present, I can only tell you that the cords of Lorca’s harp were cut with scissors, that my heart fell, the chords of my heart falling down through the octaves below the range of human hearing.
    Diego divorced me, and I divorced him. I was entirely bewildered but still entirely in love. But in the terrible confusions of love, there was an eclipse of the moon. How did it happen? Astronomers of the heart could explain it like this: I couldn’t take the pain. The loneliness of being flung out of his orbit made me demented for solace. I am a stray moon, and I would swing into the orbit of any consoling planet. So the moon was eclipsed by a passing star. I became exiled not only from him but from myself, and that was my one unforgivable sin, which I regret so bitterly now, because it was a fall from my own grace. I was fatally eclipsed, and I swung away from the truth of my own trajectory. My mind was born winged, but that was the one moment when I betrayed the gift