Breadcrumb #537
KEVIN GRIFFIN MORENO
My ancestors believed that the source of all rivers
is the maw of the ravenous sea monster Cipactli -
part male, part female, part reptile, part amphibian, part fish -
slaughtered by Tezcatlipoca (“Smoking Mirror”), who shaped
its mighty carcass into the green scaffolding of the earth.
My own source is in dispute:
neither fish, nor fowl, nor snake, nor toad,
nor Mexican, nor American, nor heathen, nor pious,
nor here nor there, but always thirsty. A bend.
A meander. A confluence of departures.
For example: one day my father and I went walking along the Danube
(named for Danu, the primordial water, mother of the serpent Vritra,
who imprisoned all the rivers of the world
until it was slain by Indra, King of Heaven).
On the bank, saucer magnolias bloomed a pink so delicate
it was all I could do to not shove the petals in my mouth.
He said we would be leaving Austria forever,
and in my grief I gathered dead beech leaves
in a white envelope, as if I could send home through the mail.
Years later, my mother and I went walking by the mouth of the Patapsco
(which may mean “black water,” “white rocks,” or “tide covered with froth”).
She took me to hear a man who said he could warp the shape of ice crystals,
simply by scrawling curses on jars of water and freezing them.
Snake oil and bullshit, I sneered.
But some time afterward, a Wixáritari magician
anointed my bare chest with spit and ashes,
and he said I should plant a coin and a candle
in the waters of the swift-flowing North Saskatchewan.
And, yearning for a river to flow on, I did.
My ancestors believed that when Chalchiuhtlicue (“She of the Jade Skirt”),
god of baptism and storms, destroyed the Fourth Sun,
she transformed humans into fish so they could survive the coming flood.
Then she broke her water on a red chair, and two babies,
female and male, slithered away from her on that rushing tide.
My father I remember as a coward, for the most part.
But once, on a hill overlooking the Shenandoah
(possibly “River of Swans”), on a day of grey light,
he spotted a man poised to kill a copperhead, and said:
“Mister, if you hit that snake, I will strike you down.”
A century ago, my grandfather left his home in the High Place of the Frogs
and followed the Left-Handed Hummingbird across the desert
until he came to the Place Where the Prickly Pears Grow Among the Rocks,
which floats on the memory of the Place of the Herons,
just below the surface of the Navel of the Moon.
All three places - mythical, ancient, and contemporary -
lie superimposed on each other like acetate transparencies,
nourished by a network of revenant canals
that swirl around an island
where a rattlesnake writhes in an eagle’s mouth.
My ancestors believed that the roots of the Tree of Life
are watered by an underground river
that snakes through black defiles
and carries the fleshless dead
to the nine levels of Mictlān.
I believe that one day I will board a canopied barge
on which the name of my mother is spelled out in flowers,
and I will pass between the bones of abandoned gods,
and I will flow down that ghost stream towards home.