A History of Wickedness/ The Diary of Thomas Garrison, the excavation of El-Zoty, Petén Basin Region, Guatemala (a poem)
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A History of Wickedness/ The Diary of Thomas Garrison, the excavation of El-Zoty, Petén Basin Region, Guatemala (a poem)
A History of Wickedness/ The Diary of Thomas Garrison,
the excavation of El-Zoty, Petén Basin Region, Guatemala
i.
I didn’t want to leave the spaces of childhood,
the airy rooms, the cellar I’d never gone into.
I knew the minute I stepped out the door, time would
petrify to a road between me and who I’d go on to be .
My blood now harped solely on the buried city.
So I knew it wasn’t being drawn, magnet-wise,
to just any ruined temple. But as to which
was attracting it, it didn’t say.
ii.
The jungle could make even a seven-storey Mayan
pyramid vanish; just three metres away from
the fern-covered steps, nothing could be seen
of the lurking leopard as it curled up
like paper set aflame.
We fix the laser onto the plane, and point
the beam at the ground. That sweeps across
the designated area, and, lastly the computer
creates a 3D image of what it picked up.
Tikal was three times as big as they’d thought:
sixty thousand Maya structures in the jungle’s
insatiable stomach: fortifications, city walls,
so that logic could stretch diagonals between them.
iii.
The mass of stones swam through me,
slowing my heartbeat. Then, from my words
a new pyramid rose, within a new,
as yet unknown, sentence.
I never say what I want to say.
When I don’t speak, then too, I am
just keeping quiet about the difference
between what I have succeeded in saying,
and what I’d have liked to. The place
I wind up in, all unawares, through
the wormhole of the sentence.
Memory, like a crystal glass,
falls into oblivion, explodes into sounds,
then from the sounds a new mirror forms,
in which the present may look at itself.
iv.
Things at El Zotz resemble themselves
least of all. The girl from the village
didn’t recognise her love: Who are you,
she said, you gorgeous, manly door?
The locals say someone dragged the mountains
over the horizon, and when the sun is eclipsed
ants overrun its rotting flesh.
But it carries the years effortlessly on its back:
the heart can bear many times its own weight.
v.
Overtaken by a shower as we headed home,
the rectangular cuboid of the storm swam through us.
We ducked into the shelter offered by a fan palm.
Two vertical anticipations pressed up against each other.
©Anna Bentley 2022 for the English translation