At a dark portal between cosmic realms
A wizard found himself stood up by the Morning Star--
Evening his element as the Rain God's is water.
She who has the power of giving flowers
Promises everything is alive
As long as the night sky stays fresh and new.
"Only a moment here on earth.
It is untrue that we have come
To live here on earth."
The hand and foot prints on the rock suggest
The presence of unseen
Beings who have been here
Before us. The air, god-charged.
The words, cut from the same stone
That will lie over us,
Have been given only a moment
To prepare that place to
Which we have been sent.
On a golden dais laid over the broken stones
In the declining shadow
Between the rising of the Morning Star
And the setting of the Evening Star
The palace of the Smoking Mirror is built.
The second temple is not like the first.
Water Deity (Chalchihuitlicue): Aztec--Mexico, 15th-early 16th c.(Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Tom, thanks for these today--Venus--she's something. She is in the New World a figure of war? Or the morning star signifies this? Which makes sense here in your poem, the tension between desire and destruction. Unless I'm missing something so late now between those morning and evening celestial presences....
ReplyDeleteDale,
ReplyDeleteKnow what you mean about that missing time between, but can't yet tell if it's a briar patch or a bed of roses upon the altar of the second temple.