What could ever equal their quickening, their quicksilver jet pulse of arrival and dispersal, mercurial purl and loop in the fluid arena of the floodlight toward which they had been lured like moths to their undoing? We were eighteen that summer, Mike and I, working on an old Greek-registered freighter carrying holds full of golden corn to Mexico, corn that flowed like ancestral blood through the continent’s veins and south, down the aorta of the Mississippi, to be loaded for transport across the Gulf. From Baton Rouge it was hours threading the delta and one long night suspended between stars and the galaxies of luminescent plankton stirred up in our wake and then a week at anchor awaiting a berth in the harbor at Veracruz. By the third day the sailors had grown so restless the Captain agreed to lower the gangway as a platform from which to fish for squid, which was not merely a meal but a memento of home flashing like Ionian olive leaves. Ghost-eyed, antediluvian, they darted upward, into the waiting, handheld nets, and then the sailors dropped everything to dash with their catch toward the galley like grooms carrying brides to a nuptial bed, one slit to yank the cartilage from white-purple flesh tossed without ceremony into a smoking skillet, trickled with lemon and oil, a pinch of salt, and eaten barely stilled, still tasting of the sea that had not yet registered its loss. That’s the image that comes back to me, the feast of the squid, and thereafter we passed our evenings playing cards or ferried into port after a dinner of oily moussaka by one of the ancient coal-burning tenders that made the rounds like spark-belching taxis among the vessels lying at anchor, and the gargantuan rats drinking from the scuppers, and the leering prostitutes in the harbormaster’s office, and the mango batidos Mike preferred to beer, and the night we missed our ride back to the ship and walked until the cafes closed and slept at the end of a long concrete breakwater, and the sky at first light a scroll of atoms, and the clouds at dawn as if drawn from a poem by Wallace Stevens, tinct of celadon and cinnabar and azure, and the locals waking on benches all around us, a whole neighborhood strolling out to squat and shit into the harbor, and then, piercing the clouds, aglow with sunlight for which the city still waited, the volcano—we’d never even guessed at its existence behind a mantle of perpetual mist—Pico de Orizaba, snow-topped Citlaltépetl like the sigil of a magus inked on vellum, and everything thereafter embellished by its hexwork, our lives forever stamped with that emblem of amazement, revelation, awe.