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juno

after sunset, the sky was the color of a swimming pool at night. black rock city looked like a demented moonscape rife with freaks, fairies and frat boys huddled in the dust, forming a perfect circle around the temple. lamplighters walked silently inside the temple with giant torches, while the crowd watched their sharpied wishes, memories, prescriptions, pet memorials, apologies, proclamations of love, prayers, pleas, vices, mantras, agonies and lost loves alight. the moon rose -- and after a week of looking at art, humans and construction that the brain usually reserves for acid trips and lucid dreaming -- it took me a moment to realize that it was not an amber egg glowing, rising, lying on its side and yawning. it sat low on the horizon, like a groggy couch surfer lifting an eyelid and scratching its nether regions to see what all the commotion was about. people started howling. at first, it feels silly, ridiculous. but howling in public can make the hair on your digits grow, your incisors sharpen, your stomach prickle in a metamorphic way. especially when you're howling with thousands of other homo sapiens fresh-baked for days in sedative heat. 


the howling subsided as a woman began to sing. oh holy mother earth, to the tune of ave maria. she stood on the top of an art car, parked near the edge of the crowd, surrounded by a small choir. her voice fell over us like a satin veil, like rain, like a needle looping our hearts together on a necklace. the moment i heard her voice, my heart split open like a tree stump speared by lightning. sorrow is physically experienced and released in the throat. wonder and ecstasy (of the organic variety) are experienced in every corridor of the body -- butterflies in the sternum, sunshine in the veins, a sensation of the soul being held upside down and spanked in a room somewhere deep within, taking its first breath. sorrow, closing the windpipes. wonder, a solar crown on the brain. ecstasy, opening the heart.

embers soared like fireflies until at last, white light pulled the tower down like a flaming ball gown, a fallen swan. juno: an offering to the residue of the world.