Burning Towers, Standing Wall

                                   (Tabasco Province, Mexico)

I.

At sunset the surface of the wall gleams gold gleaming
and seems from even a short distance a smooth
impenetrable force swelling forward to meet the light
or the gaze of the visitor to the Maya ruin and locals
offer their service as guides or show what they mean
to sell in a mixed language of numbers and night
disperses everyone but insects crawling into fissures
in the crumble, field stones and mortar and flat
stacking stones, which divide what from what once

So doves come, a spotted turkey, iguana and
lately a pair of trogons to sit like lords on the ruin
where rocks flake away in rain and birdshit
in which seeds set, shell-stripped in the bellies
of the birds or wind-sown, sending up
stem and aigrette into unkind light and wind
while colorless thread-thin roots
force cracks in the capstones
to give way, rain and sunbake
dissolving mafic bonds as the exposure
vesicles inward

Some of the sounds bouncing from the stones are
nearly the same sounds they heard — resonant
human voices and the perwicka perwicka
of a quetzal in flight at a distance —
and give us access to them almost
through grinding cicadas and crickets
thrumming serrated thighs
though their domestic acoustics, the high
rubato laugh of children and the basso
continuo of city commotion
have precipitated out
leaving a gravitas around the ruin and into this
the walls swell with oxidation
and orange lichens press outward,
the crust flakes off into rain
and termite clatter, the chimmuck of falling pebbles,
undertones the stones conduct
along cleavage planes
so that if decibels diminish
as they approach silence
but never entirely fade,
this fresh patter is stirred into a vibrating, immeasurably
thin memorial ache inside the walls
and as primordial

II.

What came over the walls was drought, the 206-year
cyclical brightening of the sun, umber dust from the fields lifted
and blew into joints between stones, the pocks in the stones,
boys running along the god-faced wall
wiped their fingers on an altar
freshly carved from soft green
trachyte already hardening, exposed to air,
into a delicate grey,
fewer and fewer hand marks,
the number of shadows across the stones dwindling,
the same number of walls, resilient limestone blocks quarried
with a basalt axe, wood pry, bound together
with mud-gravel and lime cement,
plastered on the stones with trowels
and fingers, the crisp imprint of a fir needle
from a thousand years ago visible
in the desiccated mortar

What came over the walls was the enemy the conquered ones
the immiserated poor the infidels who
scaled stones on the knotted rope of their alien language
on spikes of vengeance with fire this section of the wall
shivered then and this part split like a lip, thatch and wooden lintels
burned as the enemy climbed through
the pitch and rhythm of their shouting rebounded from the stones
and screams clotted-off in smoke that veiled the city and
licked into those meticulous slits that represent
the iris of the human eye in figures
stuccoed to the collapsing temple's roof

What came over the wall was disease a plague
the priests could not avert a plague that made the stone
builders distrust each other and steal away
from walls they laid in a square clearing on the
scarp of a mountain and plague followed them
into the wilderness with a yowl
like a clay saucer making circles on the floor,
and though, as ever, cumulonimbus
pompadoured over the far mountains,
crows swirled above
the abandoned pyramid and king vultures
drove them off and even sea birds flew in and
squawked from the walls in hordes
ransacking corpses for their flesh and the stones
were white-crested and dribbled argent bird-lime

The Spaniards blew up the walls to see
behind them blasted the walls and crushed them
to pave roads to extinguish the trace the refuge
of the heathen to make noise they
mutilated stelae rubbed out glyphs the bark
codices burned and the temple frieze behind the stelae,
and to traces of blood and resin in braziers and on
altar stones they sluiced fresh blood, they chipped away
a relief carving in pumice of the former
ruler holding a manikin scepter, the facing stones
squared, well-smoothed and fitted
toppled into a monolithic mass of rubble and
mortar no girder still itself among

What lifts over the wall are gnats, iridescent butterflies,
a haze of mosquitoes, the night carousing
click-songs of wukus or cacomixtles
rummaging through the showy blossoms
of a Capparis tree whose trunk and roots
hold back the rubbish of the wall where it breached,
some animal that leaves relicts of katydids in its feces
comes over the wall,
and the scent of nectar comes over the wall,
the anniversaries of eyes.

III.

One over two, two over one. You must look
until you find the flat side of a round stone.
Don't put the largest on the bottom, but assemble
a communion. They rise to the surface of fields
in the rainy season.

One over two, two over one. Shim the round
stone with the flat. Lay a cross-stone here
to bind thicknesses. After you harvest
sandstone, use a chert wedge to bevel a fissure
where you want it to break. One
over two, stagger the joints.

Two over one, one over two. This stone weighs
three arrobas and no man could lift it. We are given
to understand that by means of a special whistle
the stones, big as they are,
arranged themselves
without any help to form these walls
for the first upright people.

Position the flatter side upward. Mix the crushed
and burnt limestone in a calcite bowl to render
sticky plaster. Start at the bottom, work across,
and then move up a row. Larger cap stones
stabilize the walls. One over two, two over one.

An index finger dressing a joint will
fix in the mortar its mark, an intimacy
to surpass every other gesture the hand
has made. What went on
behind these walls and who stood here
and hissed out or was massacred
so that our imagination of them is saturated
with encounter? And what do they frame
if not the intuition of our relation,
a resonance? They who heard also
the echo of hammers and dogs upwelling
into their hills. And followed Venus with their eyes
on its transverse. And stood near this same wall
noting the caliber and flow of a stream of urine.
Two stones butted together in a course and another
stone laid over the seam. Who sopped-in
laughter and met pain with breath. And sank under
the ceaselessly breaking wave of event, is
conjugating here. The fragility of presence. A bird
perched at the tip of a branch. Singing, we say.

Forrest Gander
Eye Against Eye
With Ten Photographs by Sally Mann
New Directions

Copyright © 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005 by Forrest Gander.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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