His body coiled burning on the water
whose remorse cut a sort of drunk “s” a highway in the dirt from Tula
whose wisdom became ash leeched out among the young roots
whose old silver greyed and crusted over and his papers coiled and turned in on themselves
His arms annoyed and prodded
by the greasy fingers of old shamans
He who they wasted with their drink
*
And he remembered the celibate priestess
her eyes cloudy turned away and bored and unresponsive
This face and his reflected in the water
in a long cursive “s” of vapor as he boiled
*
In the morning
his heart suspended in the clouds the horizon dull black with the loss of his human body and human thoughts and wisdom
his body into vapor
This beating memory
flicker
morning star
---
This poem fragment was a little bit inspired by the work of Armand Schwerner. He wrote made up "reconstructions" of Sumero-Akkadian inscriptions that he called tablets. Now my technique is hardly similar but the idea behind this poem is. I took inspiration from an ethnopoetic translation and created something new out of it. The result is something that is inspired and informed by indigenous culture but new, filtered through the influence of our own culture. I believe that the original poem was based on a myth in which Quetzalcoatal sleeps with a celibate priestess after becoming drunk and then burns himself in remorse at which point his heart becomes the morning star, Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli. The original translator of this poem actually happens to be Ángel María Garibay Kintana as well but the version I read was by Jerome Rothenberg.
Source poem: http://www.ubu.com/ethno/poems/quetzal.pdf
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