You dead of single abyss, shadows of one ravine,
the deepest, thus on a scale
with your greatness there came
the true, the most consuming
death and from the drilled-out rocks,
from the red-topped columns,
from the laddered aqueducts
you plummeted as in autumn
to one sole death.
Today the empty air does not weep,
is not familiar with your clayey feet,
forgets your pitchers that filtered the sky
when knives of lightning spilled it out,
and eaten by mist the might
tree was cut down by gusts.
It held up a hand that fell suddenly
down from the height to the end of time.
You’re no more now, spidery hands, frail
fibers, entangled web—
whatever you were fell away: customs, frayed
syllables, masks of dazzling light.
Yet a permanence of stone and word,
the city like a bowl, rose up in the hands
of all, living, dead, silenced, sustained,
a wall out of so much death, out of so much life a shock
of stone petals: the permanent rose, the dwelling place:
the glacial outposts on this Andean reef.
When the clay-colored hand
turned to clay and the eyes’ small lids fell shut,
filled with rugged walls, crowded with castles,
and when man lay all tangled in his hole,
there remained an upraised exactitude:
the high site of the human dawn:
the highest vessel that held silence in:
a life of stone after so many lives.