In Search of the Next Sun

 

At Teotihuácan I watch helpless as you slip away,

are sucked, taken

from this time into that other.

You walk beside me,

children and grandchildren scattered oblivious

between pyramids of Sun and Moon

along broad Avenue of the Dead,

but I know it is only your shell accompanies me

silent and pale as chalk.

 

Later you try to describe the place you escaped

with such effort: brittle and cold

between two millennia gone and now.

How you tore yourself from the witness

of your hologram eyes,

obsidian knife entering breast

after breast, blood-drenched hearts

lifted from darkness to sky

in search of the next sun.

 

Birthplace of gods, at its moment of greatest glory

a pulsing city of pyramids

and butterfly palaces,

home to 200,000 Otomi, Zapotec,

Mixtec, Maya, Nahua and Totonac,

craftspeople, potters,

worshippers of Quetzalcoatl:

feathered serpent who gave them

source and ordinary life.

 

Something terrible happened here,

was all you could say

when you finally made it back to me,

something unspeakable,

and you did not speak of it

until our poet friend

told her own near-death experience

caught at the pyramid’s highest point,

unable to descend.

 

At Chaco too you feel the terror,

especially at Pueblo Bonito: Great House

of 600 rooms holding central kivas

in its arms, incomplete circle

of walls, small doors and high windows

framing passing clouds to capture beauty

camouflaging what happened 800 years ago

when this was the center,

hub of roads stretching to cardinal winds.

 

And at Canyon de Chelly, Spanish bungling

of the Navajo Tségi—“inside the rock”

where in 1805 at the place two streams converge

a shattered cave remains as evidence.

Invaders massacred women, children, old men,

and two centuries later

their fear inhabits your body,

you draw into yourself

the screams cutting desert air that day.

 

In a thousand years if we are still searching

for the next sun

I wonder if certain visitors to Auschwitz,

Ramallah, Baghdad, Kabul, Soweto,

Morazán, Acteal or Port-au-Prince

alive to what happened there

may feel themselves pulled into a dimension

between their time and ours, fear they will

not escape what we still do to one another.