Frida Kahlo Atop the Pyramid of the Sun
       

What can we make of our relationship
to the past, how Frida couldn't leave
her wounds behind, the failing leg
she'd one day lose, the uterus
pierced in a street car accident?
When she left Diego she became Las Dos

Fridas, and like this we betray the dreamers
we once were, our youths looming expired
as pyramids, great constructions abandoned
by time. Human beings are just another
in a long list of primates who have eaten
what they could until they couldn't.

There's no way to escape, no staring
into the eclipse the priests rightly predicted,
no amount of hand-carved obsidian
to hang around our necks as a talisman.
All the temples at Teotihuacan are sublime,
all the fields on which blood has pooled.

Frida, blazing, glorious, with her wound
surely could not climb that pyramid,
and now here I am, a spy in her bedroom.
I see her things, the dresses she wore,
the mirrors in which she became real. Now
when I look at the sun all I see is black.

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Copyright © 2022 Nick Courtright All rights reserved
from The Forgotten World
Gold Wake Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission