1

under mountains
of stone there is little
sign of the people;
in the air around
there is even less,
their dust has all blown away
in the passage of centuries.

unfinished people,
you Inca ghosts
abandoning the cutting bridle
to the famished eagles,
scavenging empty streets,
turning over dead leaves
beating their lament.

hand to mouth
an impoverished life now,
but when they swallowed
the light fragment
by fragment, promised rain
soaking
expectant fields
on proud flags —
could they eat
the black globules
as they pooled
and dropped off?
        Starving
while sea rocks grew
in them,
        salvation
with axe and saw,
scavenging
        the dead blossoms
leading to the high rocks?

2

I ask you,
if salt swept from snowy
highways,
your brooms wet
leaning with hunger,
did you carve footholds
against these tower walls,
fashion
    
Corinthian,

        rococo,
        Romanesque,
        ancient ashlar

garden walls defining
where some Inca Tarquin
beating flowers with a stick
signaled the destruction
of his dazed enemies?
can we search the air,
beat out the empty wombs
searching for the dead?
never turning up
even a pock-marked bone
from the living founders?

3

Macchu Picchu, did you
heap stone upon stone
over a foundation of imagination,
use tears to buttress
your coal slag,
throw blood
into the gold smelter?

dig up the potter’s field
where you dumped the naked
bodies of slaves. 
never knowing
the difference between
their fitful sleep
and more restful death.
do the dead sputter and snore?
do they drool, mouths
hanging open
slumped against
any handy wall?

which wall? that wall!
where the weight
of all the stones —
    
walls of stone

        teeth in the stone
        gnawed stairways
        floors of flattened stone

hovered above them
under a cold hard moon
crushed by sleep.