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The ExcavationDigging, on the fourth day, you find a stonefeather, an angel's wing, torn from the house of the king. In the post classic age, the people tore it from the lintel and used it for the threshold of their house. They went into the temples and took what they wanted. Perhaps, they could still hear it rustling, fixed and trembling to the frame of heaven, still trying to take flight, to return its bat-like way into the underworld, that mouth that in the classical age was also the door to the sky. Whose history has power over you? You ask when you wake up in the morning from nightmares of Mayan gods. Whose wing is that brushing by? you ask in the day, when you hear that someone else has died in the spot where you were standing just a moment ago. That wing, then and now, still has power. Perhaps when they cemented it to their door, fixed it to the order of their ordinary days, they could still it hear humming, as you do now, trying not to touch it with your own fingers as you pull it from the ground. |
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Issue #11, September, 1999 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.