Coatlicue, c. 1500, Mexica (Aztec), found on the SE edge of Plaza mayor/Zocalo: basalt, 257 cm high (National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City)
I take Coatlicue with me to market,
her rattlesnakes striking each
other beneath her skirt, zoomorphized
feet, pieces of eyes and skulls, talons
and feathers, to help me find something
for the little love I’ve lost—
some dish some spice some poison—
until she frightens other shoppers
and we’re asked to leave. Gravediggers
exhumed her once in 1790, with the sun stone,
but reburied her for she so terrified
her diggers. Hands and human hearts
around her neck, she’s meant
for power and I can’t bear myself
asking for something as mundane
as death. She’s basalt heavy, tired of being
misunderstood, and I drag her behind me
with a rope. Bound together
by those broken parts, she’s decapitated
(they say her children killed her)—they say
she swallows us who need her, allows us to live
in darkness. I lead her behind my empty house
through the alley, small shoes strung on a telephone
wire, through the side gate toward the backyard
where my daughter used to pull
the heads of dandelions and blow her wishes
into the chill night air. I offer Coatlicue
a beer from the ice chest, but those two snakes
sprouting from the stump at her neck,
their split tongues curling downward,
decline. She pulls up a chair and pretends
to rest, though we understand that’s impossible.
She and the other mothers saved our very cosmos
by offering their own lives. I ask her would she let herself
be turned to stone again for love,
that pain. She peels off her heart hand heart
necklace and offers it to me.
I take it to the place my daughter lies,
stone to stone. And then I understand.
