R.A. Villanueva
Of a child before the trepan, trill
of the stone pick, the shaman’s loosening of the blood-
swell against her skull Of hands
as a poultice, the woundwort salve
at the forehead Of a burial with cornflower garland Of joints still-
nursed with pollen still among her bones we find here circled
by bones That mothers wove their fingers raw That eldermen farmed
the cordillera with palm and knuckle That boys cast atlatl
and dart even with shoulders broken at the center places, would walk
and fight on fractured legs, with bruised marrow
That when the Inca
crossed into the cloudforest so also came the new
dead dried, bound together as bundles, skin and eyes intact,
arrayed in feathers and shells for the soul to follow
*
Berlin archaeopteryx, bird-
lizard, the claw ringed by feathers,
the jaw bearing teeth Hollow wish-
bone vault within salt-stone, engraved
arabesque, a grand jeté crowned
with sickle wrist Ur-vogel, lathe-
tendon, pressed Tethys lithograph,
a counterslab print of thresholds
down in the lagoonbed, waiting—
Icarus somersault, snake-neck
Mephistopheles Delacroix
drafts nude-winged above Wittenberg,
between the earth and air Rock-speak
confluence of demon, of law
*
We are left the bull
or bison or auroch, its charge
across the Lascaux triptych
and the rhinoceros unfinished
Here a man without bones
is a box with the head of a bird