When Neil Armstrong first walked across the face
of the moon twenty years ago did she tremble?
When the astronaut came back from space he was a changed man.
Nothing mattered any more. After all, he'd seen the earth unveiled,
turned a little crazy, and it was like looking into the face of the gorgon.
He saw what we've done to her in the name of civilization,
making the first imprint in thick lunar dust.
In Guatemala, I held a Mayan smoking mirror in my hand,
a piece of fallen star, but you'd already planted another seed.
Did the moon shudder, the way you expect me to nowó
like Chac-mool, who ripped the heart from an unborn sonó
only to wonder why the smell of death greets us in the chaparral?
I am a vessel empty of light. I should have known better
than to trust the sun. When you walk across me,
Luna cries in a language you'll never understand.
Newton said, for every action there is a reaction.
We cannot reconstruct the past to fit our poetic needs,
nor to ease guilt. Footprints remain after 20 years,
as if it were yesterday, or, only moments before.
Perhaps we should never have crawled out of the broth.
I want to tell the gobies and mudskippers there's been a mistake.
Go back into the ocean, your mother. We can't live on land,
nor breathe the air. In the Galápagos, evolutionary myths
crawled out of the precambrian mind of the sea.
Our lives pass before us in geometric exponentials.
Long after we've gone, life will continue;
another blastopore, in all its variations, germinating.
The goddess is made of basalt like the sea floor.
Off the coast of Japan, two rocks got married
with golden ropes, but the waves threaten to take one back.
They fortifed the islet with steel girders and concrete,
trying to halt another kind of progress.
You understand the bondage part, but not love itself.
The gods of dailiness have swept us bare.
Fallen off from ritual, who are we then?
Danger chose to walk in the form of a pigmentary default,
likening your eyes to the sky. You've found the cliff
to throw me from, and still not satisfied,
you want to barter exquisite corpses for forgiveness.
Your father is dead—his blue eyes beneath the Sea of Cortez—
tell him everything. Perhaps the sea will take you back.
No questions asked. But then, you already saw to that,
shuffling the tarot cards with a dealer's ease
from the bottom of the deck.
5/22/89
1992 Chaminade LiteraryReview
1990 Sonoma Mandala
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