Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems

Girl of Lightning

135 Girl of Lightning The bodies seemed so much like sleeping children that working with them felt “almost more like a kidnapping than archaeological work,” Dr. Miremont said. —New York Times, September 11, 2007 Thunder loves you, mumbles charms to warm you—folded cold body. Lightning’s pity picks you, licks a kiss, but what’s left to wick? Even direct hits miss— no amount of flash and hiss fires you. Inviolate virgin, inflammable channel to Gods long gone or gone underground, ghost-gray flecks left in the rock altar, your shelter for five centuries where you huddled, red-painted hair and wreathed with feathers. Weave threads of your shawl— not a shroud since you were live when left for dead—weave cover please, I beg your handlers. Pull stitches so that wound closes over your smoldered remains. They say you clutch your mother’s hair, strands in a bag sent up the mountain, an introduction to the Gods 136 of Science, who read threaded DNA to determine who you were related to when human. Not the crushed boy near you, no brother he nor sister the girl, bound away to sacred silence, cased in plastic cased in glass. Visitors point and justify the past: See what they did—child sacrifice. Fattened ’em up, drugged ’em— Spanish violence, Christian influence, border fences, all deserved because of her wad of coca leaves and elaborate braids. Lightning’s mark spares you display. Singed cheek and blasted chest, blackened flesh looks less asleep, flashes back the fact you’re dead, a charred mummy, so far gone even Lightning’s longing couldn’t wake you. Thunder won’t forget you, hums a generator’s song in cooler vents to your coiled form in cold storage— song of your six years plus five centuries come to this: doom, doom, doom. Lightning still sighs: release, release, release. ...