Tarascan Sub-capital

The fifteen-foot ramparts were torn to pieces
by peasants for fences for five hundred years
but the Tarascan main street all the way down
to the lake is as it was for the most part.

To tote the lava rocks they wove backpacks they attached
by thongs bound round their sloped-back foreheads
and then built fortresses like spirals chopped in half,
which they called yacata-domes, from which they battled the doom
the Aztecs tried to bring them.  Their observatory’s quadrants
told them when to sow down in the alti-
plano, when to do fiestas by stomping
ching-ching with ankle bells to tantric drums
and when to suck out venom with the vacuum of fasts,
for even the nature of evil abhors a vacuum.

Like moths, their eyes fell in love with torches
whose wands on fire were showcased in butterfly boats
quite safe, you know, in the big blue bowl of the lake
from which they drank when thirsty.  They lived and throve
among these marshes and piney-wood mountains.
The hummingbird whispered them with its wings that said, “Zig-
zag, I fly anywhichway.” Their everywhichway powers held
their secrets in the same sound as when green wood sizzles
while burning, as water boiling, and in the wind whizzing
through feathers unpredictable as windsocks’ tails wagging
and the whirlybird that wasn’t invented yet either.