Ruins

Margaret Randall

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780826350671
• eBook ISBN: 9780826350688
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In this poetry collection, Margaret Randall uses the metaphor of ruins to meditate on time's movement--through memory, through cities, through the leavings of history, and through the bodies of people who have experienced time's transformations and traumas. Randall's ruins include not only Chaco Canyon, Hovenweep, Teotihuacan, Machu Picchu, Kiet Siel, Petra, and sites in ancient Greece and Egypt, but also Auschwitz-Birkenau and lives shattered by torture and oppression.

Always there is that moment of arrival, as another reality rises before me, superimposed upon the one I live today. Sometimes the membrane is torn, and I find myself moving in and out. Boundaries dissolve. A mysterious space, between then and now, warns as it invites: promising revelation and maybe also fresh trauma if I am willing to risk its secrets.--Margaret Randall, in the Introduction

Blood Lightning Speaks⁵

 

1.

In Nebaj we pass through streets
where sleepwalking ghosts walk,
answering our questions
in tongues we don't understand
or staring silently.

 

A torturous climb past cemetery
of pastel afterlife,
sudden waterfall around a bend,
then into this humid village
where time measures differently,

 

dead and living spirits cross paths
in broad daylight
as if they are one and the same,
avoiding our eyes
while making themselves at home.

 

A great migration of Swainson's Hawks
fly north each spring,
torol k'älaj or bringers of rain,
lifting the Southern Cross
from sea.

 

As distant from Nebaj
as those who delivered fresh fish
to Machu Picchu's royalty
centuries ago and latitudes away
where another empire sang.

 

Each fall the hawks fly south again,
dropping the Southern Cross
below horizon's line,
clearing the rains
and bringing seed to furrow.

 

Torol sak'j, the constellation
announcing the dry season,
is not the same Southern Cross
of vernal sky
I've searched these seventy years

 

but a splatter of stars called sigma, phi,
delta, gamma, lambda, epsilon, and eta
in our Western rendering,
xic or hawk
in the K'iche' noun-verb

 

of the highland Maya: my Sagittarius
moving as those birds move
in predictable return,
heralding a sky,
sweeping its rush of tears

 

and announcing a time to reap,
naming the day
and doing its deeds
by the short calendar⁶
with its seasonal adjustments.

 

Between each row of corn,
black beans and squash
turn their faces skyward,
content to follow
the tall stalks' genuflection.

 

Women whose cycles match corn
give birth
in the same nine months
it takes the tender plant
to ready itself for cutting.

 

Child and corn arrive at fruition
on the repeated day-names
of their conception or planting,
closing the circle,
keeping their histories alive.

 

The day keeper determines his dates
by divining moons.
Midwives note when the blood
of pregnant women
pauses to catch its breath.

 

The waning moon becomes katit,
our grandmother,
reflected when an eclipse
swims on the surface of water
set out in little pails.
Harvesting, butchering, felling trees
and having sex: all are shunned
during diminishing moons
when animals, crops, and people
are vulnerable.

 

Babies conceived beneath lunar wholeness
or during a partial eclipse
may be twins or transsexuals,
inseparables or two-spirit beings
changing back and forth

 

every three or four days, then
three or four years,
their behavior, dress
and personhood
drawn to celestial reason.

 

Sowing dried kernels of maize
and strong black beans
from last season
are tasks only right
for a waxing moon.

 

2.

Beneath Nebaj's mute surface
you, my love,
find children who lead us
to their mother: trust
taking our hands.

 

In this welcoming home,
open sewerage elicits the look
that passes between us.
Our host smiles, says she
understands if we're not hungry,

 

and we eat with urgency and shame,
breaking silence, trading lives
to the rhythm of homemade sopa
and threads of the huipil
telling a story we cannot read.

 

Blood lightning speaks and stars dip
to that mindful sea
as great kettles of hawks funnel south
and each stalk of corn
turns to its left and bows.

 

Keeping up with the sun, stalks rise,
guided by stars and birds:
cause and effect interchangeable
in a place where sky instructs
and time holds past and future

 

in a single breath.

Landscape of Possibility

 

Your memory moves sure-footed from old trees
to tender shoots, struggles through dry years,
robust but watchful in the wet,

 

travels in reed boats to a triangle of volcanic land,
where you carve great monoliths of rock
and raise them like sentinels.

 

It honors weather and place, nurtures cyclical ritual,
keeping sun and moon aloft,
traces hunger and plenty,

 

carves genealogies in stone, acknowledges lineage
so we may know who shared such experience
and what they bequeath to us.

 

Our memory places its footprint on the moon,
looks upon earth from a point
beyond the pull of personal gravity,

 

loses itself along twisted pathways of deception,
speaks a language unknown to our siblings
on the other side of the mountain,

 

trips over cell phones and payday loans, hidden fees,
foods murdered by pesticides,
bloated with hormones,

 

betrayal of animals kept in the dark and so weak
they cannot stand. Cybertriggers leave us
longing for that lost line to the night sky.

 

Our experts impose their memory on you,
draw what they see in black lines fading to grey
or dotted to extend the visual evidence:

 

where they believe you went and why,
give you names bereft of your lived lives,
their prisms of disbelief.

 

My neighbor cannot speak to me or hold my hand,
but your memory rises to kiss my sundried lips
and I reach back

 

through stone and a rain of stars,
let stillness calm my wings, silence turn me
toward a landscape of possibility.

 

NOTES

1. Teotihuácan has most often been written Teotihuacán. Years ago, when I lived in Mexico and knew anthropologists who worked at the site, I remember hearing it pronounced with the accent on the first a. In the context of working on these poems, I did some research on the Nahuatl language, which reinforced my early audio information. I believe placing the accent on the first a may more closely approximate the original pronunciation. I have chosen, then, to render it this way throughout this book.

2. Some of the background for this poem came from “A Rich History of Chocolate in North America,” by Sara Coelho, in Science Now, February 2, 2010. Patricia Crown, at the University of New Mexico, has been studying Chaco's cylinder vases for the better part of a decade; s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface: An Arrival
• Places we Call Home
• Survivor
• Carrying Dead Mothers at Our Breast
• Chocolate Zigzags
• Nankoweap
• Hovenweep
• Kiet Siel
• Before They Changed the Rules
• Chosen or Imposed
• I Happened to Look Out my Window
• Tanka
• Brazil is the First to Fade
• Today it is Haiti
• Offended Turf
• Vulva or Mouth
• Cursive Writing and Old Slide Rules
• The Algorithm Tells All
• Truth or Dare
• What it Means to Belong
• Evidence
• Palenque
• Xukpi or Corner Bundle
• Ready to Tell Almost Everything
• Man with a Crocodile Head
• Against the Weight of a Feather
• Thank you
• David
• Laurette at Teotihuácan
• In Search of the Next Sun
• Underground Astronomy
• Keeper of Art and Laughter
• Frida's Column
• Hermes, Shapeshifter
• Coming from Nothing, Going to Nothing
• We are Hungry
• Peeling the Onion
• Real Books
• Ars Poetica
• Last Poem
• Socrates Walks Barefoot
• Perga Rests its Broken Bones
• Separating Aspendos from Sky
• Where the Dead Lived Better than the Living
• Different on the Family Farm
• Grateful without Knowing why
• The Magic in what we Know
• Blood Lightning Speaks
• Landscape of Possibility
• Notes
• Photographs