
University of New Mexico Press, Fall 2011
RUINS - poems With a Foreword by V. B. Price
In Search of the Next Sun
At Teotihuácan I watch helpless as you slip away,are sucked, takenfrom this time into that other.You walk beside me,children and grandchildren scattered obliviousbetween pyramids of Sun and Moonalong broad Avenue of the Dead,but I know it is only your shell accompanies mesilent and pale as chalk.Later you try to describe the place you escapedwith such effort: brittle and coldbetween two millennia gone and now.How you tore yourself from the witnessof your hologram eyes,obsidian knife entering breastafter breast, blood-drenched heartslifted from darkness to skyin search of the next sun.Birthplace of gods, at its moment of greatest glorya pulsing city of pyramidsand butterfly palaces,home to 200,000 Otomi, Zapotec,Mixtec, Maya, Nahua and Totonac,craftspeople, potters,worshippers of Quetzalcoatl:feathered serpent who gave themsource and ordinary life.Something terrible happened here,was all you could saywhen you finally made it back to me,something unspeakable,and you did not speak of ituntil our poet friendtold her own near-death experiencecaught at the pyramid’s highest point,unable to descend.At Chaco too you feel the terror,especially at Pueblo Bonito: Great Houseof 600 rooms holding central kivasin its arms, incomplete circleof walls, small doors and high windowsframing passing clouds to capture beautycamouflaging what happened 800 years agowhen this was the center,hub of roads stretching to cardinal winds.And at Canyon de Chelly, Spanish bunglingof the Navajo Tségi—“inside the rock”where in 1805 at the place two streams convergea shattered cave remains as evidence.Invaders massacred women, children, old men,and two centuries latertheir fear inhabits your body,you draw into yourselfthe screams cutting desert air that day.In a thousand years if we are still searchingfor the next sunI wonder if certain visitors to Auschwitz,Ramallah, Baghdad, Kabul, Soweto,Morazán, Acteal or Port-au-Princealive to what happened theremay feel themselves pulled into a dimensionbetween their time and ours, fear they willnot escape what we still do to one another.