Obsidian Butterfly

*Obsidian Butterfly: Itzpapálotl, goddess at times confused with Teteoinan, our mother, and Tonatzin. All of these female divinities have fused in the cult that since the sixteenth century has worshipped the Virgin of Guadalupe.

They killed my brothers, my sons, my uncles. On the shore of Lake Texcoco I began to weep. From the Peñón headland rose eddies of saltpeter. They picked me up gently and deposited me in the atrium of the Cathedral. I made myself so small and so gray that many mistook me for a little pile of dust. Yes, I myself, the mother of the flint and of the stars, I, pregnant with the ray of light, am now the blue feather that the bird abandons in the brambles. I danced, my breasts held high, and twirling, twirling, twirling until I became still; then I began to sprout leaves, flowers, fruits. In my stomach throbbed the eagle. I was the mountain that breeds while it dreams, the house of fire, the primordial pot where man boils himself and makes himself man. The night of the beheaded words my sisters and I, hand in hand, jumped and sung around the I, the only standing tower of the devastated alphabet. I still remember my songs:

In the green density
sings the golden throat of light
the light, the beheaded light.

They told us: a straight path never leads to winter. And now my hands tremble, the words hang from my mouth. Give me a small chair and a little sun.

In other times each hour was born from the vapor of my breath, danced for an instant on the tip of my dagger and disappeared through the gleaming door of my little mirror. I was the tattooed midday and the naked midnight, the small insect of jade that sings between the grasses of dawn and the mockingbird of mud that summons the dead. I bathed myself in the solar waterfall, I bathed myself in myself, flooded by my own luminosity. I was the flint that tears the nocturnal opaqueness and opens the doors of the downpours. In the Southern sky I planted gardens of fire, gardens of blood. Their coral branches still graze the foreheads of lovers. There love is the meeting of two meteoric fragments in the middle of space and not that obstinacy of rocks rubbing each other to seize a kiss that fizzles.

Each night is an eyelid that thorns can never fully pierce. And the day never ends, it never stops counting itself, broken into copper coins. I am tired of so many beads of stone scattered in the dust. I am tired of this solitary truncation. Lucky mother scorpion that devours her children. Lucky spider. Lucky snake that sheds its shirt. Lucky water that drinks itself. When will these images finish devouring me? When will I finish falling
into those deserted eyes?

I am alone and fallen, grain of corn dislodged from the cob of time. Sow me among the executed. I will be born from the eye of the captain. Rain me, sun me. My arid body through yours will become a field where one is sowed and one hundred are reaped. Wait for me on the other side of the year: you will find me like a lightening bolt stretched to the shore of autumn. Touch my breasts of grass. Kiss my stomach, sacrificial stone. In my navel the whirlwinds grow calm: I am the immovable center that moves the dance. Burn, fall in me: I am the grave of quicklime that cures the bones of their sorrow. Die on my lips. Be born from my eyes. From my body images burgeon: drink from those waters and remember what you forgot at birth. I am the wound that does not scab, the small solar stone: if you touch me, the world will burn.

Take my necklace of tears. I will wait for you on this side of time where the light inaugurates a happy reign: the pact of the feuding twins, the water that escapes between the fingers and the ice, petrified like a king in his pride. There you will split my body in two, to read the letters of your destiny.