In college I had read about Siberian shamans marrying tiger spirits. Then a while after I met Cesario he mentioned his other wife, his jaguar wife. There’s discussion of shamans having jaguar wives in a book about his tribe. It’s forbidden for female shamans to have jaguar husbands because the males are too aggressive. C said she was able to tip him off sometimes when there was danger, and keep him up to date on things happening in the forest. She lived in another world, he said, but the distinction between there and here is very fuzzy in his intellectual millieu. The easiest way for a human to go from world one to another is with that drink they drink. The jaguars look like people over there. He has three children by his jaguar wife. He told me their names once, and hers as well, but they didn’t stick with me. He told me he did some healing work on his mother-in-law there one time. There was something wrong with her heart, and he offered to take it out and fix it. She didn’t want to let him have it, but he convinced her to trust him, and she let him take it out and work on it, and he healed her. He drew a lesson from this, and told me: you can’t keep yourself all to yourself. Sometimes you have to have the courage to trust people enough to let them in to help you.

I'm in a Vienna which resembles some down-at-the-heels part of town in the USA. I'm with some friends but go up on a vacant lot for some reason I can't recall now. The ground is dirt, there's some scattered trash. There's a street person there, a white guy who looks about 65 and seems insane. I can't speak German and I'm sure he doesn't understand English. I don't want him messing with me or whatever I'm doing. I pick up a stick and smack it against my open palm, threatening him: "You f*** with me, I'm gonna give you some boom-boom, you understand what I'm saying? Boom-boom!" He's got this structure there, this contraption made of thin slats of wood held together with wire. Some kind of machine, but not really; one of those things that only makes sense in its own context. I have to walk around it on my way back toward the sidewalk. On the ground next to the big old gnarled tree in the corner of the lot is a light blue gecko. Then I see--there are four of them--five of them. In the next moment they've hunched up and grown to the size of housecats: gecko-toads in pastel colors, pale blue, lavender, pink, orange. Next they've lost their tails and grown to the size of bison. One climbs up on the back of another and does a yoga posture, a handstand, called the crow. That's the end of the dream. The same night, my wife dreamt of a giant toad that looked a bit like it was made of porcelain, and was covered in something like pearls and gems. It was underground. Two nights later, we saw the film Pan's Labyrinth, about which we had heard almost nothing. If you've seen that, you'll understand why we suddenly felt quite odd in the theater at one point.

sometimes i feel like my whole austrian life is a dream i'm having and at any moment i'll wake up in the united states and forget everything i've experienced here except a few images: subway trains, a giant church in an old city, and the face of a woman i've loved

slowly these foreign words dance, slowly, like mantises, like clouds, like noh dancers, i nod my head slowly to their quiet music. i hitchhike along the words. do the words know who we are? slowly they play their music, slowly, like mantises, like clouds, like noh dancers. recently they have been taking me back to the mid-1980s. i nod my head slowly in assent, ride them across the years. slowly she and i appear on the roof of the art building at night during a street festival, peering down at the crowd. we knew each other from history class. in a discussion we were the only ones who argued in favor of casual sex. our eyes met before we left the room. now we waited for her friend to leave so we could turn to each other and touch for the very first time, hands on each other's bodies, tongues in each other's mouths, etc. i didn't want a relationship though because i wanted to hold all kinds of girls in my arms, her and many others, enthusiastic as a young dog let loose in newly-fallen snow. today i move slowly, like mantises, like clouds, like noh dancers, nodding to the music of the memories that travel with me, like syllables of the word that i am.

one day i felt strongly that since we were having sex, we should be married. i phoned her up. she wasn't there. i left a message on her machine asking her to marry me. when i brought up the subject again that evening in her room, she didn't say anything, just put on a cd and, for a long time, danced with me.

i stood near some pines, heard them popping all over, this early spring day

In 1999, I visited the Guatemalan-American writer and translator Victor Perera at a rehabilitation center in California. The previous year he had had a stroke that had destroyed his ability to speak clearly. But he talked to me at length and with great enthusiasm. I had the impression he was telling me about the visions of a near-death experience he had had during the stroke. In 1978, my father took me to an aquarium in British Columbia. We had read that the Indians believed it was good luck when the mist from an orca’s exhalation touches you, so I sat close to the water for the orca show, and the wind carried the mist of a breath to me. Afterwards, the young untrained one and I gravitated to one another like magnets. She was named Miracle because, out on the ocean, some people had shot her and her mother with automatic rifles, and while her mother had died, she had survived. I leaned over the fence and stroked her face, touched her conical teeth, and shook her tongue, which a trainer had said orcas like. I lay on my belly and reached under the fence to stroke her better, only stopping when my shoulder got sore. I Googled her recently and found that she died in 1980 of lingering complications from having been hit by so many bullets. In 1995 I had my last unimpeded conversation with Victor. He spoke about the Lacandon Maya shaman Chan K’in, who had been his mentor during some visits to the Mexican rainforest in the early 1970s. “When I learned that Chan K’in died,” Victor said, “I was really sad, and I talked about it with the Kogi shaman where I was staying in Colombia. He said, ‘Now that Chan K’in has died, you have to be Chan K’in.’” In 1998, shortly before the stroke, Victor sent me a letter which mentioned that a female humpback whale had flirted with him off the coast of Chile as he was making observations for a conservation project he was working on. He said she made it abundantly clear through her body language that the two of them would be fantastic lovers were it not for the barrier of being incarnated in the forms of different species. In 2007, in front of my computer, I tinker with these passages until my eyes sting; move them around, try to sum them up. Victor died in 2003; I wonder if he’s with that humpback whale now. I let the cat in from the hallway of the apartment building and he leaps up on my lap and headbutts me in the chin. I think we may have to be the shamans, the rainforests, the orcas. In the center of the universe, in the middle of time, everything we have been and will be is arrayed around us, a network of breathing light.