René Descartes moved down through his mind along a ladder to a French or Dutch rooftop starting place. What he meant but was afraid, I think, to say, was he thinks therefore he knows he am.
            The moon’s light seems like its own. That’s natural. Then one dozes and it drops behind. One sees oneself outside oneself and so on. Consciousness arises and sets out for there.
            Afraid because the new certainty added a layer between his knowing and the thing he felt his knowing know.
            And then there’s the problem of wrapping one’s mind around the endlessness, if it is endlessness, and the reaching back for.
            One night in Monterrey, Mexico, we slept up on the rooftop of a cinderblock house. The moon, which men from what had been Mexico had walked on, had come up fairly full above the saddle-shaped Cerro de la Silla, which you could see from anywhere in town at the time. Then a friend of a friend peeked over roof-ledge and nudged the second wooden crate of Carta Blanca, local brew, up and over. At their outermost circumferences, the burnt-caramel-brown bottles were scratched whitish where they’d jostled one another, the labels white, red, black, gold, sleep, slate, blank.
            “Mucha luna, eh?” somebody said. A lot of moon.