Reckoning

Within each breath I take, there are secrets hiding. Unnamed silences. The place I paused to listen and master my own voice, hoping that someday I could would be able to pronounce the name of a country I could call my own. I have abandoned exile, but I haven’t unpacked my suitcases yet. The cool night is punctuated by seven tight explosions, the sound of air bursting with heat and velocity. Yesterday I started dancing again. But still the bombs drop, and white phosphorous showers down on the bride and groom, and just around the corner, bullets fly. Balloons and empty bottles of liquer stand where another child, "Junior," fell. Metal catches fire tearing sound apart. Silence. There is blood on our faces any way we turn. If we speak to the dead, we must also surrender to their presence. Tezcatlipoca(1) you have arrived by taxi on the I-80 freeway, the same freeway I took home today. I accept this fact because I have seen your ashes everywhere. Silence. (We cannot speak yet of grief as we are grief.) Tezcatlipoca(2), I saw you with an ancient key and a smoking mirror in hand. An ubiquitous obsidian wind tells me you have moved in next door.


--Lorena Wolfman (c) Copyright 2011

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1 Aztec pantheon. Tezcatlipoca is the Smoking Mirror. He is the god of the nocturnal sky, god of the ancestral memory, god of time and the Lord of the North, the embodiment of change through conflict.

2 The north side of the universe was identified with Mictlán, the region of the dead and is called Mictlampa, place of the dead. It is associated with the color black, with the Técpatl gliph or the sacrificial knife and it is presided over by the black Tezcatlipoca. The North is an arid region where the cold winds blow. Tezcatlipoca is the patron god of warriors and princes; god of the cold represented by the night sky. He is a providential god who has the gift of ubiquity. His principal attribute is the smoking mirror; his costume is that of a tiger and his emblem is an obsidian knife that represents the black wind. Tezcatlipoca is, along with Quetzalcóatl, creator of the world.