Two Poems

Christopher Bernard

Dogville

Welcome to the chalked tangle,
welcome to the dead mine,
to the unelmed street, the dead seat
of the unthroned. Where the bog darks.

You do not have a visa?
Go to the wall, or better yet, a cell. You do not
have a constitution in your pocket?
The buzzer emphatically screams. Go to hell.

Believe, oh infidel, in the apodictic
right of freedom’s lie,
of the unconstrained pursuit of happiness
into the labyrinth of the dog’s tail.

March, smile, wave. The scag unfurls
into the eagle’s might. A president
descends into pitch black.
Everyone says please and thank you.

Off with the shoes. Spread those legs.
Aim high. We’re all in the all-together
since slammed and burned. You didn’t know?
Not the difference between gizmo and Gitmo?

And Elmo! He’s our king! or is it
Spongebob of the Squarepants?
March, march, to Ur, to Kabul,
to Baghdad beneath a bloody rag.

And drawn and quartered the city 
gives good head abruptly detached,
brands in bloody letters Liberty,
hung mouths, the muted kiss.

The peak shafts to the core.
Snow lards the sandstorm,
covering tanks and Blackhawks with a gravy
succulent and deeply strange. The big dog eats

off on his own. Crumbs fall like bombs
exploding at his feet. He doesn’t care.
The mountain rises at his whipping tail.
Thunder blacks his teeth. He eats alone.

The Poem of Lady Xok

In a windowless room at a temple’s heart,
come with her husband to unmask the future, 
the favorite wife of King Shield Jaguar,
Mayan ruler of Yaxchilan, 
is shown bowing before us in heavy corn-silk, 
maize-wrapped splendor, on a scarred and welted, 
slightly cracked, sumptuary stone.

Obedient to the gods (as if we might be gods,
standing under the stone lintel of her future),
her husband holding beside her and above
a burning spear, his headdress splitting 
like a ripened husk on his flat, squeezed head, 
above a hard face and jagged eyes,
her thick eyelids closed beneath the wilderness of her
     crown
twisted, ornate; almost invisible
in the lapidary baroque of time’s stone wheel,
in a trance of bee-smoke, buzzing and numb,
bent over and kneeling, the Lady pulls 
a thorn-studded rope through a hole in her tongue.

We turn and look, respectfully repulsed,
fascinated as the blood drips, in bits of stonework,
is collected and smeared on a scroll of bark paper
in the stinking closeness of the stone-clad room,
in short lines and spots, like the lines of a poem
one can almost read if one looks close. On the second 
panel, we see the bloodied bark burn.

Out of its smoke and tongue of blood, 
a long snake writhes,
unfolds and writhes and fills the chamber
with its crooked thigh, and slits its mouth
open, showing a vision of the future….

But that has not come down to us.
What filled her eyes we can only guess
from these panels of limestone from the eighth century,
found in Chiapas –– a type of stela,
whose manufacture from limestone and wood fire,
led, in time, to the deforestation

of the Mayan lands. That, with a drought
of some seven years, brought to an effective end
the civilization of the Mayas. (The docent turns back to
     the panel.)
The work is signed: “Ah Maxim of Naranjo.”