The Vendor of Sayil

The Vendor of Sayil

There are days when Palescon is imbued with its own numinous misty antediluvian aura which at dawn

could not have looked less desolate. I’ve learned

that these putrid ditches should never be taken straight, despite your thirst and lust to reach that rumored

rivulet below the entrance to Sayil. The sun

here takes dead aim at your eyes and the sensitive juncture above the eyebrows to inflict dizziness, migraine, nausea. The lone

Indian who runs the one concession sets Cokes and aqua minerale

in a bucket filled with melted ice until they reach a temperature “just below freezing, so you must sip slowly or you will . . .”—

and he mimics the march of the “tour bus tourists”

Before and After they tromped through the mangled pass, that the persistent stalks, mingled with weeds, conquered.

Our guardian gestures for me to rest on a crate in shadow

inside the red shell where he stocks “one of everything under the sun.” He stacked Cokes from the ground up to form a pyramid

before they branched out on the single plywood boardwalk

infested with termites and dust, gravel, and notions. The mineral water remains in cartons where the truck driver dumped

them off in his handcart. Each six-pack still wrapped in plastic,

like a boxful of grenades at ground level beside the front door. The more I want to find out the more my heart

encourages: silence, silence, silence—and it is right.

Shed the signs of hurry and listen: visions and vertigo often do not

pass with the other symptoms brought on by heatstroke, and how “the ones who glued to guidebooks do not respect . . .”

this least attended to of known ruins in Yucatan.

I return to upright position turn 360° and note how the stoic succulents know to waste nothing on the parched earth

and wonder why the cracked, ungainly rocks and boulders

have come to rest at a distance in the distance while the view extends to the low mountain range I mistook for the horizon.

Yet with every blink the landscape shifts focus, revealing

barns, corrals, horses nuzzling burlap sacks, farmers kneeling, armadillos crawling like armored tanks out of arroyos,

prairie dogs emerging from holes and I wish I could say the sky filled

with birds as colorful as the macaws in Palescon, but in an infernal furnace like this the pale sky unleashes only birds of prey that hover,

undeterred, like fathers who, night after night, open the refrigerator,

stare, and hope magical thinking will fill the emptiness and so stare again, as if cultivating illusion. How he can repeat

the same negative operation and never get the hint—continues to mystify.

Now the sole vendor of Sayil picks up where he left off— or had he been talking all that time?—”do not respect . . .” as he points

to the noon sun which has reached an angle where if we didn’t

hide inside whatever shadow zone we can find has the power to fry our brains and burn our eyes out—of our heads!

Even post mortem the visitors who’ve disappeared still talk

of dehydration and that all they have to do is drink more water. Whose idea was it to make this our weekend jaunt over a day

when instead the waterfalls could be pounding the heat and strain out of our backs

while we swim in the amazingly uncorrupted rivers? Who but the anthropologists, who asked only to observe?

They didn’t have to be directed—they could bring their actual focus

to the nameless peripheral roles they ended up playing, now and then, wandering in and out of Tohoscope’s generously horizontal frame.

And where are the actors, the crew, the extras?

I could venture in only far enough not to miss Sayil’s always-ready phallus. And I’m afraid to wonder if the others know to return

before the dangers in the noon hour bring them too

to ruin.