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The DiscoveryThe heat seems to have handspressing down upon anything that moves, urging every body back into the shadows, back into that offertory box buried in a late age, beneath the ancient altar of Copan. The Post-classic villages were trying to revive the old gods with new sacrifices: Tlaloc and his 'goggles', the flayed skin of a living man, loosely ringing his eyes, the integumental shroud worn to renew the god's powers to see into the realm of the dead. When nothing came of the sacrifices but more sacrifices, Copan was abandoned, the doors were ceremonially closed, the Navel of the World was buried. But now in the sun, others are drunk with discovery. And though the ants stream up out of the crevices like the enraged children who survived the flood that drowned the last world, though tonight Jose will be beheaded with a machete, though in the morning Pedro will be run over, though it will rain in the hours when it never rains, and an earthquake will collapse the sacred tunnels, nothing will stop this relentless unearthing. Deeper and deeper into the earth, the mind crosses a threshold of salt and disturbs the baby snake: its black body and red head, no less venomous for being newly hatched. |
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Issue #11, September, 1999 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.