Machu Picchu-Cuzco

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You dead of a common abyss, shades of one ravine--
the deepest-- as if to match
the compass of your magnitude,
this is how it came, the true, the most consuming death:
from perforated rocks,
from crimson cornices,
and cataracting aqueducts,
you plummeted like an autumn
into a single death.
Today the vacant air no longer mourns
nor knows your shardlike feet,
forgets your pitchers that filtered the sky
when the knives of the lightning ripped it ope
and the powerful tree was devoured
by mist and felled by wind.
It sustained a hand that suddenly pitched
from the heights to the depths of time.
You no longer exist: spider fingers, frail
threads, tangled cloth -- everything you were
dropped away: customs and tattered
syllables, the dazzling masks of light.

And yet a permanence of stone and language
upheld the city raised like a chalice
in all those hands: live, dead and stilled,
aloft with so much death, a wall, with so much life,
struck with flint petals: the everlasting rose, our home,
this reef on Andes, its glacial territories.
(sec. VII)