Birth as Prologue

Unpublished in book form; excerpted from "Visions of a skylark dressed in black" from author's web site

My suspicion is that I was born reaching for it, the gently swaying veil of light that composes my beloved's face.

According to my father, I was born some time between 3 and 5 a.m. in a desert on the night of a blue moon in August. He says that both he and my mother were asleep when it happened, that she thought I was him seeking to comfort either her nocturnal agitations or perhaps his own wishes while she dreamed of seven dolphins singing the psalms of David and Neruda to a small star that had fallen into the Atlantic ocean. In her dream, the dolphins had gathered their voices into a circle around the star and the vibrations of their compassion began to lift it out of the ocean like a command from the Greater Beloved unshackling a soul condemned to hell and lifting it toward a higher sphere. The sleek silver bodies of the dolphins danced like flowers upon the waves as the star rose slowly but ever higher. It was when the flaming ball broke the surface of the ocean that, my father tells me, my mother felt the tug on the connection between us and woke him up with her fists and screams.

What was it that frightened my mother most? The fact that I was outside her body, on my hands and knees covered with the wetness of her inner being and now, too, the sand and darkness and mysticisms of the world? Or that there in front of my eyes still gazing at other existences was a scorpion the size of my father's foot. The arrow point of its poisonous tail was curved towards my face. I believe, sometimes, that I recall hearing it, the scorpion, prophesize that mine would be an existence at once made glorious by unyielding fever for the Great Beloved and yet, relentlessly tortured by that same burning. My father could not move faster than the scorpion could strike. The spear of its tail pierced the space centered between my brows.

What was it that surprised my father the most? The fact that despite the speed of his love he had been too slow to stop the scorpion's poison from finding its mark? Or that this freak of a scorpion nearly as large as I, struck and gashed the flesh of my forehead, then fell immediately lifeless into the sand? Even as he rushed, weeping, to gather me in his arms, he heard a keen high wailing that rippled across the desert like the sudden unfolding of dimensions hidden and divine. He and my mother huddled together, presuming the scorpion's sting had erased my life, hammered like two brittle nails by a screeching that grabbed the night by its ears and shook it until the entire desert joined in its concert: coyotes weeping the names of dead medicine men, hyenas crackling the sprits of mischief and mystery, tumbleweeds whispering poetry against the rising and falling of the earth's sighing breasts, three owls glowing like Sufis with the ballad of a majestic name pouring like wine over the fears of human hearts.

The tears that fell from my mother's and father's eyes were so profuse that he says they could barely see, and yet nothing could have stopped them from witnessing the sight of velvet-black so dynamic with resonance it was radiant. My father recalls a cloudburst of sand, a spiraling curtain of beaded lights, and the sudden appearance of the ebony singer soaring upward, its wings barely moving as it cleaved through the air toward the moon. The higher it flew, the louder it sang, scalding eruptions of harmony and timbre, and the louder it sang, the stronger the aroma of violets and roses in that place where neither grew. The creature sailed in a straight line as if a powerful spirit were pulling it from above. It then stood out in brilliant black relief against the huge round white of the moon, black diamond on white onyx, dizzy and dizzying with the churning spiral of its spells booming through the desert. It seemed for a time suspended inside the moon's adoration of its flight, absorbing through its beauty half-notes and whole melodies, fragments of genius and tragedy. Then it began its journey downward, traveling so fast it seemed the planet would shatter once it struck the ground.

It never did. No more than five feet from solid earth, and less than ten feet from where my mother stood holding me, this feathered creature swooped in a curve and snatched between its beak of sparkling shadow the spent corpse of the scorpion. It ascended in a wide arc that took it once again face to face with the moon, then descended in a wider circle than before, in this way journeying through the eternal night until it was no longer visible.

My father and mother wept until they saw their tears had washed from my body the sand and fluids of birth, and that despite the scar shaped oddly like a crescent moon between my brow, I was very much alive. My father was as frightened as he was elated. My mother was as angry as she was baffled. Not only had I left her womb without assistance, but I had done so three months early. And, she told my father, I had deprived her of a responsibility, and thus a source of honor, that was distinctly hers.

"A male child who delivers himself has no need for a mother. He belongs to you and this desert." With those words she left me in my father's arms. He remained with me until I was 11, when I had grown as tall as he and people seeing us together would mistake us for brothers. He said death would make it easier for him to find my mother and reclaim the adventure of their marriage, but I have spoken since with his spirit and things did not go exactly as he planned. On this side of life my mother had already chosen another husband, and on the other side of death was waiting for my father another wife.

How much of what my father told me about my birth was simply myth to entertain a growing boy and how much of it truth I may never know. What I can say for certain is that the scar between my eyes is indeed a curious piece of art, something like a shadow of a kiss trying to complete itself. And my life is constructed of very odd encounters with unusual beings and entities, strange enemies and allies. But most of all, apparently I am owned by the mystery of the Great Beloved, of who or what it is, of its presence both within and external to my being. Am I a chronicler of its reality or simply one articulation of it? I find in all things, in streets and ants and people and streams and stars, both possible answers to this question, and, further questions that dig even deeper the well of my tortured ecstatic longing.