1.
Today’s august-
The human honeycomb seethes.
Aureate tides issue from the crystal sky
And radiate, as they sweep down
The shaggy green backs of verdurous cordillera.
Yet in
Are behind fences and wire.
My homeland has a hand in this, but
I am not of my homeland.
I am as everything under the vault of the sky;
I belong to the terrible expanses.
The land rolls unheeding.
The sea rolls unheeding.
Time rolls unheeding.
The land,
The sea,
Time
Do not recoil before such diminutive monsters
As politics, economies,
Or imagined borders.
They level and make insignificant
The thieving passions of man.
They know a wordless generosity
Whose abundance cannot be diminished
And possess no urge for domination.
Pineapple light, blood orange at sunset,
The roaring voice of the Pacific
The song of unseen wild birds in the morning
The lace work and lances of leaves and limbs
The pelting rain falling in open, warm spaces
On roofs of tin or palm leaf
And the people beneath to bear witness.
In the remote distances of childhood
I was showered in its diamond mist.
Not so distant, sea and childhood,
Not so distant, you and I,
Only a few strides under the sun.
The crests and swells of time
From the people over which it cascades
And pulls along in its murky riptide.
And yet you are kind to me.
And yet you lavish me
With your language
With your songs vibrating on strings
With your food that you pull like a miracle from
Your fields and the sea
With overfull hands.
Full of variegated
Fragrant petals,
Allow me to lavish you.
2.
Jaguar patterns
Of dark sand
Toss in the wake
Of the clearest water.
The color of idle afternoon clouds
Disperses across a field
Of soft granules.
Where they were tossed
Under the eyes of ageless vultures
Who took them to be impenetrable turtle shells.
A tiny Spartan
Sidesteps the bleached bone
Eggshell fragments.
The little warrior
Has compensated in time
By corporeal diminution
And amplified precision of movement.
Are jostled in the ebb
Of incalculable days.
Casting lines in the break
Casting nets in the tenor.
I resurface to bask in midday’s seraphim.
At each ascendant peak
Light touches and flashes a star-point
On the blazing veneer. I am
Following the Nereid alighting
From the distant
When I dive back into the water’s coils.
Unfolds on my trembling cornea.
The horns of the sea sound.
A conch’s low bellow
Follows my muffled ears
Into twilight sediment.
I feel the fullness of my body displaced.
The language of this reality annunciates itself
On the teeth and tongue of light.
My lips are glazed by salty air.
Something is readying to be spoken.
A point of reflection
Stilled and plucked
From the spiraling tide of impressions,
This axis of body and mind and place
Is not to last.
A tremulous groan shakes the throne of the water.
4.
Rain.
Mercury sheets
Shake the window.
Percussive chorus
In the rafters.
Metallic shouts
In the huddled forest.
So similar
To that silver song of the coastline.
The sound of an army in motion.
Assume a lonely air.
A grey leaf smacks the pane.
Outside
The equestrian smell of fecund earth
Invades the empty spaces.
Low monstrous clouds
From horizon to horizon
Are again announcing
Hurakan’s nomadic lineage.
Streams are surging.
Hoof shaped pools
Glitter in the forest like cat eyes.
The great trees creak
But no double-trilled bird song
Or arrows alight the sky.
All are waiting
Pretending silence,
Murmuring “Earth, earth, earth”...
The sky, a codice,
Unrolls
The figures of hieroglyph
Clouds.
Wanderers
On the deep orange canopy.
The resinous rain has passed.
Tiny crabs with gleaming black shells
And legs the color of coastal wildflowers
Cautiously study the being risen before them.
New fortitude
Is tasted on the tongue
Is painted on the eyes
Breathed into the lungs
Disperses through the blood.
The reddening of the sky
The silhouettes moving out across the ocean
The papaya tint the last strip of blue has taken on
And the face of another absorbed in apprehension.
That of the medium and the spirit.
I ask the other,
“What is beyond beauty?”
He answers,
“St. Peter in
Is readying to release its light and happiness
Is waiting to be struck by the blacksmith’s peen,
And we must exalt each thing.
We must relearn odes,
Raise everything to its proper grandeur,
Contemplate stones until they flash like stars.
Must be written
To the organic digestion of a moment of solemn wonder.
Then grandeur may incorporate itself
Into our own germinating perfection.
Of sun
Of shoulders and spine
Sloping in contour with the hills.
One more glimpse
Of sandy hair
Stretched along the shore
Winding in the receding tide
One more vision of her curved body
Breasts and belly
To carry with me homeward.
