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"Now it still ripples, now it
Still murmurs, ripples, it still sighs,
Still hums, and it is empty
under the sky."
—Popol Vuh
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Who would think that black gossamer
film-negatives would shield our retinas
from the isthmus that connects the slit
of light to the inverse image of a
Van Gogh Field with Crows?
This is how it felt on that rooftop.
As if a thousand bats had suddenly
scattered into a gentle purple bruise,
each to become a Byzantine tile
or a pixel of moon-shadows
using the sun as a mural.
At first it seemed like someone had drawn
a white chalk circle on a blackboard
without the screeching. It was as if a halo
was suspended in a lilac charcoal-laced vault:
black, black, blacker with a stain
of angel light.
The world had drawn a flatline,
like a babe torn from its umbilical
cord of words to reveal an open vein:
trees, houses, birds, cars, streets, voices.
Everything died at noon in transit.
Perhaps this is how Edgerton first felt
after freezing images in time with his strobe light:
running blood through veins,
but no one desired an end.
Against a fixed point our hearts beat
gently, and in the dark our clocks ticked.
Nothing distinguished us from the living
and the dead. The Aztecs knew of this.
The feeling of the instant before giving birth
to themselves. The fear of the end of an
obsidian knife carving a heart of rusted
petals, so that they could feel like this
"forever."
Suddenly unchaperoned,
the broken circle of light,
cut-glass, beamed, a ghost ship
set sail from Teotihuacán
on waves shifting to let
light grow exponentially,
piercing life's nervous laughter.
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