The first time I went to the graveyard was in a dream. The sky was dark gray and hung low over the rolling hills. It was hard to say if they were hills actually or if each undulation was a burial mound, whether or not it had been built up: with shells, with bodies, slowly impelled by the prepotent trajectory of a glacier, or some other force as shapes places that exist here but not here. Atop each mound was a fence, a windblown arrangement of planks and wire, like what might separate dunes from the path to a beach. The air was cold and heavy as if the earth only visibly ended at the ground but actually continued all the way up into the sky. I was frightened, but compelled by some lucidity, that it was no ordinary dream. That this was not a graveyard, but The Graveyard. Inside the  fences were graves, markers. One in particular I carried into the morning and onto the pages of a notebook, a figure, indented all over with crescent marks into which a blood iron colored stain had been rubbed. The dream clung to me, like sorrow. I can’t say how many days passed before I found myself, in the Baltimore Museum of Art, face to face with the same wooden effigy. But I can say that time, at that moment, stretched out and opened its mouth like a great yawning beast to whom weeks, days, months, and hours were little more than glistening specks of saliva on its carnivorous teeth.

 

The second time I went to the graveyard was on the back of the wolf. We left together from the sunny place and put my arms around his neck, grasping handfuls of fur. When we arrived the black witch was also there, as she always appears, an impenetrable inky miasma, leading us over the hills and into a deep cavern with a river running through it. As always, her communication is a silent transmission, wordless, an understanding that appears on the shore of my mind as the waves pull back, revealing something that was always there, but had previously been hidden. So it is then that I know that this place is a catacomb, for all the peoples on this planet that have experienced genocide. We travel silently through the dark waters, in reverence. 

 

Now that I understand this, she has something else to show me. We come to an escarpment, below the mounds, and she waits for us while the wolf carries me into the earth, deep down, to another sepulcher. But this one I know, as the ground opens up, to reveal three goddesses side by side, their large curved head pieces just barely touching, exactly as I had seen them before.