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