Chichen Itza

It is pivotal, a pyramid,
a landmark brought to light. Is it downhill
from here. I thought about it and I did
divine a stone dimension and the will
of those who build. What if they're defying
gravity, they seem to be defining
it as well, a rising pile of rocks,
more unwieldy than a water-clock.
A Mayan sun-dial and it makes you wonder
what it's like for someone torn asunder
on a warm and sunny afternoon
by a man whose name is Zero Bird Moon.
There's a row of skulls in low relief,
a cult of the dead, a permanent belief.

You hear about the blood and the astronomy,
the architecture up to the minute
with the sun and moon, and the autonomy
a thousand years ago is hard
to fathom. Here's a pedestal, I'm on it
for a moment, it is worn and scarred,
they had no metal. Having been delivered
by a shuddering plane with 18 seats,
I walk around the ruins with a lover.
Coming down a stairway on my feet
when a vertigo of centuries
is forcing the uncertain to the rope.
On a frontier of the sensory
I learn a lot, and wonder at the scope.

It wasn't put together by committee,
it's as far away as New York City.
They inhabited another time,
but the same old ground and air. The limestone
won't forget what happened here, the human
beings who constructed a control room,
not to mention an observatory.
We are caught between the allegory
and iguana. One of them is sunning
on a ruin. Looking at a stone ring
on a wall, the warriors had their running
shoes, a rubber ball. Would you condone
a custom of the time: kill the winner,
although no one here is born a sinner.

Chichen Itza meaning "mouth of the well,"
a nearby cenote, and on that note
a civilization floats. The show and tell
according to a hard-as-rock recording.
It was hot, I didn't have a coat,
arriving here as if a missing chord.
There was an inadvertent sacrifice:
a worn-out purple shirt I left on top
of El Castillo, in surrender. I'm stopping
for the old, a cultural device
in the Yucatan. The ancient clouds
are going by, the immigrating Toltecs
made a hybrid of the local context,
introducing their cold-blooded gods.

The reptilian god is a recurrent
motif, you see a stairway with a serpent,
and its mouth wide open on the ground,
isn't this a lovely lost and found.
The snake is coiling like a shock absorber
for the elements, and stylized,
imbued with presence. While the earth in orbit
is preferred to being analyzed,
instead of humans who are fallible
they would summon the ineffable.
There's a pyramid collaborating
with an equinox, a shadow cast
along the stairway of an undulating
serpent. It is lurking in the past.

1200 A.D. and then you're at the airport,
feeling like an import or an export
and your life is up in the air. A cold
metallic welcome and you go through customs
with your undetected film, adjusting
to another country, is it "bold
as love." Returning to a way of life,
having no use for a stone-age knife,
and yet there is appearing everywhere
I go the echo of an ancient stair.
A Mayan pyramid incorporated
in my life, the climbing under-rated.
There are stairs at work, and several flights
at home, and overhead the stars at night.