de Kooning's Woman I from From Scratch, Black Sparrow Press, 1998. is the first in a series, probably not in de Kooning's sense of it primal woman or first-earliest-woman, but these facets may have been on his mind, for we have here a series or "ones," a sacrificed and dismembered "goddess," a kind of North American Coyolxauhqui whose circular Stone was discovered at the foot of the Great Temple stairway, as well as Madonna and Child, the Child at once just born and maybe four, he is bald and white, is the Madonna's left shoulder and arm, staring at Her, perched on what appears to be Her ruddy left thigh, which on closer inspection might also be the rump of a flat-snouted or headless animal lunging to the right, whose back and legs are Her lap and legs, lunging into the shredding legs of the figure who uses the Madonna's right shoulder and arm as his breast and stomach (which is also a red-gartered, chubby, severed thigh)- he has long, loosely-tied hair, or is "he" a widwife with face hair-a pirate? sniffing or whispering to the Madonna's right temple? His breast-stomach is also his right arm swinging under the Madonna's haltered and huge right breast, and out of his splitting hand another hand emerges from which shears protrude cutting the Child's umbilicus? Or is a castration under way? All this action is simultaneously splintered and frozen, once we see the Child, the animal, and pirate-midwife, there's not much left of Woman I, or let's say she's in sacrificial drag, all but her head and breasts are others masquerading as her body parts, she is a crowned tripod of wedge-head and dome-shielded breasts, dismembered and whole? or have her body parts been stuffed into new roles? Over-sized Mesopotamian eyes, hypnotic, teeth like a porticullisbeaver-set into her face, the gaze of one who has been blasted, the left eye straight ahead, as wide open animal jaws howl at her earless head, the right eye more inward, averted, reflecting on what pirate-midwife is hissing- to her left, beyond the Child, a sketchy, wraith-like creature, at attention, facing her, seems to be tooting or snout-firing into her face, or is he vying for her attention with pirate-midwife? She whose body is her retinue, She who is slaughtered at the beginning of time, sets time in motion, whose crate-shaped upper body contains, like huge pods, food for those putting on her body, it is hideous, and magnificent, "Huitzilopochtli cut off her head, which was left abandoned on the slopes of Coatepetl. The body of Coyolxauhqui went rolling down as it fell, dismembered, in different places fell her hands, her legs, her body..."