Like the Olmecs before us, we chart our lives by
the movement of the stars repeating like Tzolkin rituals, sacrificial-blue
victims stretched and sliced on limestone alters, freed by obsidian knives,
volcanic glass from the fire mountain, fingernails of the lightning bolt, the
flint edges of a nacomb's razor hands anointing stucco faces with blood, a
breath falling down limestone stairs to Ah Kin, he of the sun, waiting
like Ah Puch, the lord of death– exposed spine, spotted body, fleshless
nose, dance under a Caribbean blue sky folding time into our flat earth,
thirteen heavens, nine underworlds that thicken our memory, flake our hand-made
past into jade masks, a mosaic of history, lightning rain for Chac, Mayan
myths ground into temple arches you chart, och chan, with stairway
lines, the equinox, the solstice, roofcombs you design into neckless bottles on
superimposed terraces you imagine sloping into windwalls, the thick-green
future macheted hands will cut back in a forest of time waiting to bury the
future, the shards of our life built by noble hands, the divine guardians of
time who know how to align earth and sky in this land we face east, the rising
run like a descending god you become, yoch-te k'in-k'in walking our sacred landscape, the earth framing us like carved bones, the humid walls of illusion we peer our of, windows onto the Yucatan, Ná, like the two
headed serpent body of Itzamná falling on the sacred year of your
birth, the year your father stared into the mural of infinity like a mirror to
look for me for you, knowing mysteries endure, like time's repeating
hands, a red shell string across my waist, your body, my braided hair, shelled
with gold, albite, my eyes dancing with the red banners of blessed words that give me to you, Chan Na in the fertile crescent we will abandon to
become vacant shrines to dead gods, a maze of green, a jungle of symbols
turning us into white shrouds, red cinnabar into a waiting earth, in a lattice
of glyphs temples of inscriptions you dedicate to Pacal, the sun, corbel
archways celebrating a plumed Kulkukan, the barefoot new year, the four
guardians of the sky, like wind gods, Ik Eheatl, Ixchel, the goddess of
the moon, Humab Ku, the creator, with red handprints and perforations,
penitential skinlines slicing into time, bleeding with stingray spines,
connecting us to our ancestors, the myths beyond our hands, painted clay bowls
of sacrifices that open a portal to infinity, Zama turning to shadows
shaped like quetzal feathers in the Temple of the Magician.
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