Birdmen of Peru

These spirits of the air made us ever dream of flight:
Think of the glider of Saqqara,
Bright dragonfly over the desert and the Nile;
And Aztec birdmen with stork-feather pinions,
Launching themselves from the temple-tops;
And those young braves of medieval Europe,
Hurling themselves off towers, with makeshift wings,
Offering their lives in sacrifice to the sky.
In the Temple of the Condor at Machu Picchu,
See the sacred bird’s image carved in granite,
Outstretched on the floor, with the groove in its ruff
Where llamas’ sacrificial blood once ran,
Telling men to trust in their hidden wings.
The Birdman of Paracas rises aloft, crowned king of the air,
Wide eyes crazed and leering,
All outstretched wings and taloned feet,
Adorned with writhing sea snakes and human trophy heads.
Lake Umayo lies hushed and glinting, iridescent,
Where once the messengers of the gods took flight
From the chullpas at Sillustani,
Who had woven their wings from the finest cloth,
Offering its magic in homage.
On the Altiplano, on the day of the Festival of Blood,
The villagers fill the plaza, drinking and shouting,
And the bull is released into the dusty arena,
With a terrified condor lashed to its back,
In a fanfare of drums and trumpets and cymbals,
Bucking and lunging, in hazardous union,
Till the satisfied revellers cut them apart,
And the king of all birds thrusts out its mighty wings
And soars up into the azure.
At Nazca the immense figures extend across the desert,
Visible only to gods’ surveying eyes,
The hummingbird hovers in a dream of nectar,
The condor planes among the white peaks of the mind.
The mummified dead lie hacked out of their graves,
Strewn all across the scavenged necropolis,
Bones and deformed skulls shining in the sunlight,
Shrunken trophy heads suspended from strings,
Lips sewn up to stop them from calling to their kin,
And mantle-rags still clinging here and there,
Blessed with the brilliant images of Birdmen,
With snakes and trophy heads in their wings,
Soaring in blissful grace in heaven’s glow,
And the images of shamans falling from heaven,
Big eyes fixed in ayahuasca trance,
Having seen through the world.
Harried as the Devil’s own by the Spaniards,
For venerating the Vine of the Dead,
The Birdmen fled into the Amazonian jungle,
And there they plane all-seeing over the trees,
Comprehending in their bones all life and death.
Bitter black elixir I swallow:
Spewing and shitting, crawling in the mud,
Tumbled in the smoke of dying stars,
I perish in a scream of silence,
And all is sudden evolution,
My arms transforming into tremendous wings,
Till the air's incantation catches and lifts them,
And they move with seraphic ease and might-
As I rise from the ground, and fly, fly away,
Over the laughing jungle, absorbed into the sky;
I am the heart of the world, the purger of evil,
The finder of truth, the maker of medicine,
The dead man living among the roots.