Friday, September 25, 2015

Bandelier: Quadratic 2134


In  lucid intervals of memory recalling:

2

that one recalls (not knowing all)
yonder outline and asks it:

why are you not black
like a sketch in India ink
or charcoal?

There, in that place,
there is a sense of someone
there.

There is a map or chart.

There is a recipe for reconstruction.

There is a sign,

1

in the sacred air between seeing and seen,
with presque vu he searches for and is searched,
with the tip of the tongue--maiden middlehood.

Where? How far away in time or space?

How? Where the mode of knowing what
one cannot immediately find is waiting
in the wings of

3

waiting like an icicle or falling oak?

How old is oneness lost not so long ago,
the loss then lost as well & all returned,
all made good?

Loss is the smell of sweat in mountain lairs,
lost is the stage play of terraced rock and cliff,
lost are the ghosts of tribes who no longer exist.


Did I ever tell you about Bandelier
among the antlers where I wrapped
rawhide around a stick with bells and feathers
and set it in the shrine?

"One deer", it said, "yours or mine,
for one or both of you."

It was an electromagnetic wave of impersonal reward:

"You are welcome here for you have respected us."

And there in this between: "But only for a time."

And next morning we walked down the trail to the pueblos
seen across the pink canyon below--

4

as in four square,
as in the ancient Chinese ZHONG,


which is a place with a banner
raised to sky and burrowing into earth,

dead center, the KAIROS
which exists anywhere in time,
backwards and forwards.

I thought she read minds.
I thought she read my mind.
I thought she saw and smelled
the vast eons around us—inhaled
them with her eyes.

I thought she saw the spirits--
men women and happy children
around one smokepole as if
they left the light on for us,
waiting.

The deer came years later.
It was a confused and naive buck.
He got it through the heart
close-up with a 12 gauge slug.

It gasped and fell.

He skinned and butchered it.

It was venison for one winter.

He knew then there was only the one,

yours or mine, for one or both of us.

E. A. Costa 25 September, 2015 Granada, Nicaragua

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