More than a year after his mother died, and after a Christmas in the dark Caribbean, on an island full of the bleached light of Hell, the two sides of which signify Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the carnival and the primitive curse, the burning light of the sun and every corner and crevice of deep reptilian shadow... after all of this, Sef stands on the porch settee of his Carolina house, and shivers...

He remembers the sweetest notion and image from such days away to be the sight of a lizard languishing on a rock in the tiny fishing village of Ocoa... sun swathed, drying of the slime... breath inhaled to small balloon proportions... down the sands from the everfervescence of the sea beneath a mountain.

Something can be seen from the point of view of horrible burning love or on the other hand that amorphous light-blind security which in essence is oblivion... from the point of view of our dark God... or the point of view of our shadowy money... but rarely do these juxtapositions meet each other for the man both innocent and awake!

But the lizard kept his grace on four legs! The lizard danced as an object of naive creation the moment Sef came too near, inclined as he was to touch God's anima. The spirit was still, then the spirit dove like a rocket ship to distant stars, like a musive idea that went to its jungle of pure and blind and stupid certainty. And, at the time at least, Sef wished that he could simply have assumed the form of that innocent predator and beast, and feasted on the flies and nibblings of a coastal rock, and basked with all lethargy, and had no charge at all, except to live and die.

No charge at all, except to live and die!... and Sef is shivering in the cold in that orphaned disengagement from his mammal warmth.