These pages you wrote to capture mental colony from its namesake, Cristóbal Colón. But what captivities does that sound, that thing, the name--Colón--hide? Drop its diacritic and you drift like plastic in a sea of erotogenic semiotics: how does the large intestine share a sign with the colon: punctuation preceding explanation, dramatizing the experience of figures and forms? What does a colon do, actually? Is rectum individual style? Is exposition of style colonoscopy? To explain: what follows is a book whose poems explore colonial myth. To explore the burrowing of our colonial myths in real-life experience--wet violence in the tough skin of emblems and instincts--the author spent four months reading the journal of Christopher Columbus before sleep. Later, he transformed his dreams into a poetic record of what his memory, in its half-sleep, had forgotten it remembered: the gash, shock, glamor, and spell of origins. It belonged to that history as intimately as that history belonged to the momentary constellations of a night sky. Its belonging, unclear and unassimilated, anacoluthic but self-instructive, is the shining of dark stars equipped with consciousness. To say simply that you could subvert Columbus and the world he left us only stages the inadequacy of the curse to do away with the accursed object. As usual, reality is contrary.

The curse imprecates the curser, the interdict awakens the nightmare, iconoclasts are slaves of icons, and, truisms though these may be, you conjure yourself inside them constantly: to subvert is to crumble to the enterprise of memory overturned, to hurl body over the head of mental colony only to flip back upward, part to an assed whole. So the question, for you at least, is how to flip from realities different than those of the colonial myth--to stay true to the reality of myth, which bakes the crust of your thought with its hot white light, while hitching somehow to new suns and ideas. How do you look inside yourself for its terrible illumination while shedding new light on that light? Could you, with mirror or sword-face even for an instant, blind the gods and their higher powers? To be clear: you are not looking for wisdom, but for a world unfolding for life. In October 2015, soon after moving to Chicago, you came up with a strategy for this. You came to it while browsing the yearly Hyde Park Used Book Sale, which takes place on Columbus Day weekend. In the chaotic pile of 30,000 books separated into 50 sections in Dole, Del Monte, and Chiquita produce boxes--emanations of the United Fruit Company--you came across a hardcover edition of Bartolomé de las Casas''s sixteenth-century Journal of Christopher Columbus. Reading the entry for that day, the 10th, there amid the boxes and browsing shoppers, you saw the rain chop the waves, shake the whole history from inside out, and take you into the storm pulling his ship down the sea. In two days, he would see land.

But, at that moment, he was in the darkest kind of sleep. So you decided to awaken with him, to see if you could see what your mind saw in what he saw and, maybe in doing so, to flash a mirror into the bleach-boiled eyes of the colonial sun. That night, and every night for the next three months during which he traveled the coasts, tricking history into his tasks, you read the journal before bed closely to have your sleeping mind think intently on its images, plots, symbols, motives, and feelings. You wished to see what, when left to its matrix of associations, your mind made of the colonial story. Notes throughout the night recorded your dreams. In the mornings, you made new notations to chart closer contacts between you two. You composed the text in the evenings, putting your dreams and the journal together into a new story of creation. What you made you now hold in your hands: the positions, spaces, and temporalities of history are tasks you gave yourself, entanglements warped in a structure that depends on you for its churn, unfolding, and thus instanced to modulate that which discloses itself nights and days.

Here is a study about how language is captivated by and recaptures the negativity of the hemispheric experience surging from its southern sources, how its inconsistency and unevenness are stopgaps because in practice a body and its myth are not exclusive of one another, but reciprocal and dynamic, semiotic and aesthetic, signs and the instances in which they unravel themselves. Like a first being looking out from the gauzy green light of a newborn cosmos, you saw the gods then as so many cascading storms. Sunday/Thursday, October 11thRoughest sea so far tube-nosed seabirdson green reeds a cane a stick bobbingcarved iron and a small board with markslike lizard hands like little lights at the end of a hallsignaling pigs to squeal hopes of landthrough day we landed and saw the lizards upright like sidewaysFs or Ys upside-downcrimping their necks to look at usimpossible words by force byfish chopping the water around us allMy Christ, my surrendering fishI see what you signal:To take the dinosaurs by forceTuesday/Saturday, October 13thTo a broken planet came menbellies and long-hair, carved likespears all wet all playing games They are a pleasure to watchso flat so slender so fast theysplit my world in two intoa dead body hiding in my skinWednesday/Sunday, October 14thThe island sick fearful shouts to uscoming from heaven for help to usThursday/Monday, October 15thAnchor daylight free from shoalsHoisted sails, bracelets, legs, and armsDiamond-shaped crystalsI touched to make them shudder &look away & I could take what I wantbracelets on their arms and legsin their ears noses and around their necks plussome dry sliced leaves they prize Friday and Saturday/Tuesday and Wednesday, October 16thwatching an airplane crash feels likeIs like what I feel watching their canoesoff the coast subtendingMaking wobbly half-circles inside meBags of human shit hanging from my lungsI don''t know how to describe itThe explosive fire across the waterHave you ever seen a plane crash?I haven''t. But I fear what it feels likeSeeing all those people dip downSaturday/Wednesday, October 17thNot all people are real; some racesmissing eyes, missing circlesThe real people of dreams w circlesin their eyes from the walk throughwidening circles to fall asleepcircles that widen from their pupilseach of whose edges w many pointseach of which is the centerof another widening w edgesare so many centers w the othersLike Emerson explainedBut it''s not a numbering not cleanIt''s a cloud thickening, thick with rainthat eventually you go right throughwet with eyes in the world of dreamsIt has rained every day, more or less,Since we have been in the IndiesSunday/Thursday, October 18thWeather cleared we sailed aroundstiff, impatientMonday/Friday, October 19thdawn orders midday sleeping so I did sothe men told me from the island I namedthey could smell herbs, spices, dyesbecoming like dogs with twitching nosesand nothing to doTuesday/Saturday, October 20thNobody to talk to I met the kinghis strange body shallow waterthe outer rims of his eyeslike rings which--slippedover my fingers--the waterrippled I didn''t want it to do thatWednesday/Sunday, October 21sttouched, lovely, green, fertile lagoonsflocks of parrots right in the sunWe killed some of them and keptthe feathers with the aloe and quintalbeads and kilograms of gold; thebirds rattled new songs in the jarsThursday/Monday, October 22ndHead is so manyMany of which move up and down a spiral staircase, the bottom level of which lives traumaIn there people, some naked some painted, throw objects to an incinerator: Abuse events, violence eventsin there red white hot, heating the whole black machine orangeUp the spiral staircase so many made objects a workshopbits of glass, pieced-together cups, figurines, earthenwareAbove that my business officesjunk furniture and dusty items Friday/Tuesday, October 23rdI dream that I am in the 1980sriding around in the back of a vanmy uncle''s van, the vanhe bought from a cleaning companywhose name is painted on the side,a cleaning company closed downcannot tell you if I should feel badabout it, their enterprise failed At the end of June 2010, shortly before taking your qualifying exams for graduate study, you travel to Guatemala City to inquire whether the particular difficulty of your life has any meaning in the company of extended family. Your cousin has invited you to visit him and his cat in their home in one of the southeastern colonias. It was the start of the rainy season, so you time your daily weave across the city to avoid the storms rolling through in the afternoon and evening. On one of your outings you visit the national university, the fourth oldest in the Americas, where you snap a picture of the provost''s office from across a greenish gauze of wet tropical trees and shrubbery. Lacking the uninterrupted confidence of a picture, a diary is desperate for its trace.

It is anxious to make a mark from the pleated rocks, pyramids, personal moods, papers, and airs of the day. The history of Columbus''s journal is awkward. The extant version is a précis--evidently faithful (excluding only navigational minutiae), made by de las Casas--which incorporates first-person quotes from a copy of the original day-to-day log. Its shaky Spanish reflects de las Casas'' editorial commitment to originary dialectic, that is, either the Genoan''s in a language foreign to him, or a semi-literate scribe''s doing his best to write. Garbled tones also complicate who comes first. Columbus is writing to satisfy and elicit royal investments (so invites comparison of his journey to Marco Polo''s); de las Casas is writing a history, and decidedly one to protect natives from exploitation (within the ethical ambits of Sirach 34:18-22); and the scribe was just laboring to keep whatever monad he had made for himself going (pace Leibniz, Deleuze, or otherwise). Damned, then, is the book from the.