A plain wide and flat as God’s palm.
Ahead, a hundred-breasted hill
spills its verdure like some Amazonian
Astarte, dense world of secrets covering tree
trunks,
branches, rocks. Nothing but this green exuberance
footed in red clay so firmly baked we
wonder if it holds the print of all our origins.
Into rain forest past dripping Indian huts
where barefooted children speak an unrecorded
tongue,
and it’s somewhere around here, I think, we lose
that slender sliver ‘I’, that tender pole in
which we hang a self.
At the ruins we marvel at fretted towers, tunnels,
vaults, sarcophagus within sarcophagus. But it’s
the fear
that’s fathomless, that we recognize as true:
Suppose
the sun-god, sunk in the underworld each night,
disdains to rise?
Suppose the pot-bellied earth-god, smoking his
cigar, decides to
hoard earth’s treasure for himself? The sacrificial
stones wait
for something hot and steaming to propitiate
the gods,
poised to devour us between bored, carniverous
jaws.
Copyright © 1989 by
Nadya Aisenberg.
From Before We Were Strangers
by Nadya Aisenberg, Forest Books, 1989.
