What I mostly realize about history, reality, is that there is a veil of mystery that cannot be penetrated exactly as we wish, and it is fine with me that not knowing is a state of mind, knowing that you do not know, it gives in to wonder, mystery, possibilities, imagination.
Bajo Mundo
On the ocean floor
Suspend unspeakable fish,
Purple mountains,
Cavernous avenues
Of psycho sound,
Echoes of plugged ears
Light from below
Another sun,
A warmness of cold gold
Endless space,
Andres Segura, deer dancer
With the Ballet Folklórico
Of Mexico spoke and resounded
That the Mechica Aztecas
Claimed origin in another
Constellation: Andromeda.
As Aztland was a star in it.
Andromeda dancing illumination
Sky fire
Ptolemy saw her being
Chased by a sea dragon
Deep in the northern
Shadows of vast sky,
I saw her once in the Bronx
Brook Avenue walking
Toward Teatro Puerto Rico
With her blue kankanas,
Spring day of her
North African curves,
Eyes moons on the coast
Mediterranean disappearance,
Where are these places?
Myth in gone,
A Paradise, a heaven,
La Gloria,
Original home?
Now clamoring from this squalor
To go somewhere else and
Become eternal sensation,
Your body finalized in some
Will you be ether changing colors
Like a rainbow or rolling in music
Bebop Lester Young,
Phraseology of Stan Getz,
Pulses of
Puente/Tito Rodríguez’s of mambo/
I just moment the breath,
This instant corazón,
Whatever was and now isn’t
Perhaps will be again
We myth the future
Endless repetition,
The clave of the son montuno
Is a circle,
Infinity of rhythmic patterns,
Somewhere you are
A coco in the atmospheric
Horizon.
The Navaho are in the
Patterns of the Berber rugs,
The Hopi in the geometry
Of the arabesque balcony
Spirals, circles, infinite
The sun’s hip points
Like the female she is
To circle turquoise feathers,
Bright realization that the world
Has been shuffled around
Like dominoes upon a table,
Under the Iceland
Hard water ice sheets
Lizards immortalized in minerals,
The once tropic night
Danced to the south,
Rose as Caribbean Volcanic
Tips, thus if walking I am
Upon the remnants of Atlas’s
Turf, Atlantic Aztlán,
Birds chirping morning
Could be ancestors,
Sense Plato the years’
Like philosophy or spirit
Than land broken, sunken,
Somewhere, Thera, Sardinia
Tsunami, the Pillars of Hercules
Combustion somewhere,
Plato approves perhaps
Through Egyptian encounters
The craftsman who elaborated
The existent universe,
Not chance
Well-administered dance
Rumbero calligraphy determines floor.
“Mu” sign of James Churchward
Reading too many books
Speculative interest of symbols
Chiseled into stone.
The brilliance of the Pacific
Is that India is there
India is enough obscurity,
Mysterium
Probing for a lifetime.
Azhlantis root word of Nahuatl
Origin
Island upon lake
The moon man in the water,
Azhland of heron white
Tint, islet of egrets,
Place of white light feathers,
Huitzilopochtli came to
His people singing like
A hummingbird, Colibrí
Listen to the song
They followed,
His mother the woman with
The serpent skirt taught
Him how to sing,
They followed to Tenochtitlan
Today Mexico City
Saw there an eagle swallow
A serpent atop boulder
Lakes there
Azhlantis to now where
Not sunken not of this earth
Atlantis, the priest told
Solon about the subconscious,
That’s what was sunken
About unseen spirit motion,
Reincarnation
You recycle the ages
Shifting, like Buddha in
His mantra under a tree
Of many befores.
Atlantis and Mu
Will not be found below water,
Submerged in caves,
Azhlantis will fall upon
Us from the sky, like rain
Of roses and white lilas
With a blue cielo of serpent
Waving,
Marriage of the brujas
Or drop from beaks of birds.
Canta. Arrives the summer
Sky blue
The road from Cidra
To Aibonito
Mountain green waves
Atlantis visuales there appear
Eyes in guaraguao sky glide.
What other plato in paradise
Of Atlantean fish,
What other who, Mu Who
Who what
Where?
Hispano Caribbean/America Latin
“Cuando en la historia de un pueblo se advierte la ausencia o escasez de ciertos fenómenos típicos, puede asegurarse que es un pueblo enfermo, decadente, desvitalizado. Un pueblo que no puede elegir entre varios estilos de vida: o vive conforme al suyo o no vive.”
—José Ortega y Gasset (España Invertebrada, 1964)
(My country was a dream of childhood.)
Whatever it was, or was it? Where were those places, were they here, how time changes space. Where I was born was Aguas Buenas, circa 1949, fin del mundo, born in the house by comadrona (midwife), singsong throwing plants, leaves Taina smoking cigar Doña Lola, all the houses in the barrio made of wood, painted blue, orange, yellow, the street like a hill slant climbing toward heaven. Did Miro paint our street? It was preindustrial; I learned how to go to the bathroom upon a latrine. Stand in front of the house, view of green mountains, ovals in the tropi cal sky wind blue or gris immediately, cloudy, rain. Rain. Such is the tropical climate. A rain factory, morning heat raises moisture, clouds gather for afternoon showers. The Caribbean is an aquatic drizzling world, rains profusely, ever read One Hundred Years of Solitude, Márquez tells us it rained for four years and eleven days, rain and war the background of Macondo, water like sea waves down the streets, best to be an amphibious reptile. But we humans. There we were in the middle of the Caribbean living our traditional village life, we were once indigenous, once Spaniards, we were the Africans brought here to work, cultivate agriculture, mix the cement, make the bricks, build Old San Juan, a medieval walled city. When I was a child boy I accompanied my mother and my grandmother going down to the river where all the women went to wash clothes upon the banks, banging with slaps of wood upon rocks the cloth
es, the songs, the gossip, chirping women of long dresses. River this time crystal-clear clean water. Bamboos leaning in waves stooping as if drunk. Where is that river now, I can’t really find it, along the path of what was once a river they have built a baseball league, channeled the river below ground, under big parking lot the current, so it is hard now to decipher the landscape of the past, that spot, where is the place that was vibrant currency? The streets of my boyhood town not yet paved became muddy when it rained, which was always the case. It’s still the same rainy region; it always rains at three in the afternoon as if to chase the school kids back home.
The Tainos, the Spanish, the Africans created a fusion culture, they became a soup. We are no longer in the native bohíos, the palm frond native homes which still lined the mountains in the 30s, 40s, 50s; they made it into the 60s some old-timers have told me. Childhood through the barrio streets, my legs spread over square latrine box of cement, the caca abyss below, make sure do not slip. I got to change bottles for pirulí lollipop cherry red licks, shorts running wind warm. Black boots I recall of my running childhood feet. The wooden houses, Rafael Hernández boleros, melody in front of my eyes, cement trucks tilted upon the street which slants down toward the plaza. Everything was being covered with cement. The wooden boards of the houses permitted slices of wind breezes to penetrate; listen to the squabble of the chickens under the house, any conversation that passed in the street was in your ear. I suppose we proceeded into progress; people just said they were exiled from el campo, the dirt streets paved, tar smell funk, seemingly a new phase of less goats, horses, oxen, cows, burros through the main street. Street named Muñoz Rivera, father of the primero elected governor, this hijo who was poised in a white suit somewhere simultaneous with my childhood, must’ve been sitting in a big house still a lo español. In that chaos of social history, upheaval of change, I was a boy running with black boots and dark blue shorts. In the the plaza where I heard voices coming from a subterranean level, Manolo, some guy I heard speak, never saw him but he was always a plaza companion, across the alcaldía; another corner the casino club for dancing, always the Catholic Church and the bank adjacent plazas, another building structure full of tobacco leaves, where mother and abuela worked in the tobacco chain, splicing leaves, taking the stem out from the center, preparing the plant for the tobacconist to roll into cigars. It was Aguas Buenas, Comerío, Aibonito of the times. Saw families jumping into station wagons, the big people saying they going to Nuyol, a place not this place, somewhere you went on something called an avión, through the sky through the clouds. We too finally got to jump on one of those metallic birds. We made it to the Lower East Side where something called a building confronted us. Behold the tenements, no mountains to be seen. We left Latin America and came to the developed city of New York. We arrived from another age, another culture, another language, another landscape. Where are we, I asked myself, as the English pushed through the cold of the years new syllables fresh dissolving within the saliva of my Spanish-flavored tongue?