The District's lesser monuments were often in decay, and the Circle's tall fountain had stood dry for however many summers, and I suppose trash had accumulated there, mostly paper, crumpled Dixie cups tossed up by children making baskets in imaginary hoops.

I did not hear the bottle shatter, only the explosive intake of gasoline igniting, flames throwing black shadows against the concrete; our shadows, running. We were all running, and in the eyes of a Kennedy-jawed girl from the Virginia suburbs I would see something I had never seen before: a feral shiver, a bright wet shard of ancient light called Panic, where dread and ecstasy commingled utterly. And then the first cannisters fell, trailing gas, and she was off, running, like a deer and in that moment as beautiful. I ran after her, and lost her, and sometimes I imagine she is running still.

Several years later, settling into the long slough of the pre-punk seventies, when Dhalgren was first published, I remember being simply and frequently grateful to Delany for so powerfully confirming that certain states had ever been experienced at all, by anyone.

The flame-lit park already so far behind.

I distrust few things more deeply than acts of literary explication.

Here is a book. Go inside.

   It's your turn now.

         Circular ruin.

               Hall of mirrors.

                     Ring of flesh.

The smoldering outskirts reconfiguring with each step you take.

Bellona.

Remember me to them.

 Vancouver, B.C. August 23, 1995

I: Prism, Mirror, Lens