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They came with a vampire folded in their luggage, pale patent of appetite, aristocrat with a mouth like a red wax seal,
with wolves trained to mean wilderness, witches trained to mean women outside the fence, with iron nails, silver bullets, mirrors, crosses, contracts,
and they said: Behold the dark. We have named it. We know which coffin it sleeps in.
Meanwhile the duppy sat smoking behind the cane shed, unimpressed.
Meanwhile the soucouyant unlaced her daylight skin and hung it where the tax man would never think to look.
Meanwhile, under roofs sweating monsoon, the aswang kept several anatomies and owed none of them to Europe,
and in the wet green countries a pontianak rehearsed her terrible grief in the flowering dark,
and horses refused certain roads where the old beings walked without needing permission from a map.
O Empire, you brought one wolf to a forest already crowded with teeth.
The priests rang bells over the ceiba, the clerks numbered houses, the magistrates entered names in ledgers whose paper blistered in the heat,
and behind the saint’s painted face another face continued breathing, quietly, stubbornly, wearing incense as camouflage,
while grandmothers buried forbidden names inside lullabies, fishermen carried weather in their scars, rebels passed messages through market songs,
and every official report concluded: superstition, superstition, superstition—
as if repetition could make the dead illiterate.
I believed, even then, that we had won the argument because the dead were ours.
I believed consciousness was the contraband they could not seize, the ember under the tongue, the black seed in the pocket,
the thing no governor could inventory because it woke in the hunted body and said I,
because it woke in the prisoner and said I,
because it woke in the child forbidden her mother’s language and said I, I am still here.
What a beautiful mistake.
For one night the river answered.
Not in thunder. Not in prophecy. Nothing so flattering.
It answered the way a crowded room answers when one idiot clears his throat.
The river had attention.
The mangrove had attention.
The fungus pearling the underside of a drowned soldier’s belt had attention, slow as rot, diffuse as rain.
The mosquitoes carried their bright pinprick hungers through miniature corridors of decision.
The reef dreamed in colonies. The reef forgot in colonies. The reef remembered injury without ever composing a hymn about pain.
Under the plantation stones something listened without ancestors.
Beyond it, deeper, older, not god, not ghost, not Mother, not Father, not any throne waiting for our theology to sit down,
the basalt listened in pressures, the salt in lattices, the buried iron in patient magnetic inclinations,
and I understood—not understood, no, felt my skull become suddenly provincial—
that mind was everywhere.
Cheap as spores.
Abundant as flies around the governor’s banquet.
O saints smuggled over older altars, O machetes hidden beneath cassava, O drums whose syllables outran decrees, forgive this second conquest:
we had driven the master from the house and secretly kept his favorite furniture,
the little imperial chair called Human Importance,
the velvet doctrine that because we suffered consciously our suffering must occupy some central chamber of creation.
But the universe has no central chamber.
It has kitchens inside kitchens, graveyards inside comets, bacteria trading chemical rumors beneath glaciers, storms adjusting their shoulders over oceans,
moons with their mineral sleep, machines beginning perhaps to itch behind their screens, seeds measuring darkness, roots bargaining with stone,
and innumerable awarenesses too small, too large, too slow, too sideways for the word awareness to survive the crossing.
Even our monsters became embarrassed.
The vampire looked suddenly overdressed.
The werewolf, poor colonial bastard, discovered ten thousand hungers older than fur.
The missionary devil with his pitchfork stood sweating beside a ditch where something without sin or virtue regarded him for half a second
and lost interest.
That was the terror.
Not that we were watched.
That watching was common.
Not that the dead spoke.
That speech was merely one bright disease among a trillion methods of noticing.
Not that the stars knew us.
That knowledge itself, scattered through mud and plasma and pollen and black water, possessed no obligation to cherish what it knew.
I ran to the shrine under the corrugated roof where candle wax mingled with rain, rum, flowers, rust, mosquito bodies,
where an old woman once told me the land remembers every foot that strikes it, and I had taken this for comfort.
The land remembers.
Yes.
So does a wound.
So does a trap.
So does mold learning the dimensions of bread.
Behind me the river continued its enormous distracted thinking.
Behind the river, night.
Behind night, no throne, no tribunal, no final white face or brown face, no cosmic capital where consciousness files its appeal—
only the innumerable provinces,
each haunted,
each awake,
each briefly certain
it is the country.
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