her thick eyelids closed beneath the wilderness
of her
crown
twisted, ornate; almost invisible
in the lapidary baroque of time’s stone wheel,
in a trance of bee-smoke, buzzing and numb,
bent over and kneeling, the Lady pulls
a thorn-studded rope through a hole in her
tongue.
We turn and look, respectfully repulsed,
fascinated as the blood drips, in bits of
stonework,
is collected and smeared on a scroll of bark
paper
in the stinking closeness of the stone-clad
room,
in short lines and spots, like the lines of a poem
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one can almost read if one looks close. On the
second
panel, we see the bloodied bark burn.
Out of its smoke and tongue of blood,
a long snake writhes,
unfolds and writhes and fills the chamber
with its crooked thigh, and slits its mouth
open, showing a vision of the future….
But that has not come down to us.
What filled her eyes we can only guess
from these panels of limestone from the eighth century,
found in Chiapas - a type of stela,
whose manufacture from limestone and wood fire,
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