And how then could it matter anymore, that what flowed to me individually from my mother was poisoned, finally, tainted with bitterness? Human love is always imperfect, carries within it some degree or other of darkness; our mothers nurse us with an inevitable blend of milk and shadow, the source both of our love and our estrangement.

But not tonight; no strangers here. Every one of us—all these Latino men and women, and their children, and the boys in their hip clothes, and the white policemen, and the curious grad students, the ice cream vendor and the happy viejas, and even Paul and I, two white gay boys with our short hair and outfits out of sync with the neighborhood—we all belong here, since we are her beloved children, bathed in candlelight and the headlights of passing cars, waiting our turn to be cleansed by her tears.

Acknowledgments

The allegiance of this book is to memory; this is a past colored, arranged, and choreographed entirely by that transforming, idiosyncratic light. Any character here might well see things entirely differently. As my sister—bless her—put it, “Well, the things you got wrong just make it that much more you.” I’m more grateful to her than I can say, for her forbearance, for her understanding and acceptance of what can’t always have been easy.

My gratitude, too, to a band of readers—Michael Carter, Bernard Cooper, Martha Christina, Elizabeth McCracken, Carol Muske, and Maggie Valentine—who read this book in many of its incarnations, and offered good advice and great company.

Bill Clegg read with acute insight, and then represented the book with such heroic energy and professionalism that I’m permanently in his debt. Robert Jones, as ever, proved the most devoted, perceptive, and hardworking editor luck could bring me; he offers every day the kind of association writers mostly just dream about.

Paul Lisicky heard every one of these pages, in their raw new form, then read every word over and over again, so that the language seems something shared, as well as the memories that language evokes. In this way it is his book almost as much as it is my own.

And to the Virgin of Guadalupe: thank you.

About the Author

MARK DOTY is the author of five poetry collections and the memoir Heaven's Coast, which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonficition. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He has als been a finalist for the National Book Award and has received numerous other grands for his work. He teaches at the University of Houston, and lives in both Houston, Texas, and in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

ALSO BY MARK DOTY

Turtle, Swan (1987)

Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (1991)

My Alexandria (1993)

Atlantis (1995)

Heaven’s Coast (1996)

Sweet Machine (1998)

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