Moon Knows

Moon knows what lies beyond the end of her beam: a brass kaleidoscope of trinkets and tuk-tuks, neon teddies and troubadours, paper and pencils. Somewhere there is a pestle and mortar grinding blood from wolf or wolf from boy. Nothing is as it seems as it twists over and over in geometry’s repetitive bite.

In a small town outside Seville a boy sits at an old fashioned school desk, its lid scarred with the dreams and desires of the classmates gone before him. Next to the black hole an ink blot of the virgin and the holy ghost watch him constantly. Truancy is not an option. Open on the desk lies ‘Materia Gramatica’ and he stares as hard as he can through conjugations and consternation in a desire to conjure the images in the leather-bound photograph album that lies an inch below wood, incarcerated, entombed within the coffin of the desk.

The teacher comes in, his spectacles two moons. He will settle for nothing but blood. He is Master of the strap. The boy sees the words melt on the page, feels his nails bite into his palms. It is the photographs that have landed him in this predicament yet still he loves them. How can he not? The photographs hold happiness in stasis. The happiness of lives already run, already lost. Children who he had only known as old men and women or not at all and yet there they were, children just like him. He was their incarnation, a seed of generations past. They too had sat in this school room. Had they sat at this desk? Been watched over by the Virgin. Had one of them conceived the holy ghost. Was Moonface there then too? Moon knows.