The Seeming Beginning
Could the end be the beginning also,
Always as somnambulant as the bumbling bumble bee?
Should we look at the seeming beginning, in time,
Also personal or metaphysical,
While measured scientifically—motion, event, and relative time?
Is it the ancient Tao from which comes the phrase “The Seeming Beginning?
And what horizons in space are the real horizons,
Measure beyond measure beyond measure?
Is the longed-for fixed point of our worlds Christ, Vishnu, or Buddha?
Where is the new knowledge to straighten the spine of conflict and strife?
Star Wars, no. Who will think, and step forth and speak?

The Little Fathers of the Rain
On the realm of human passion
The Little Fathers of the Rain stand praying
On the ground, over the earth’s hopeful seed.
For they are humble and good.
Walking in the worlds within the earth’s possibilities
Shakespeare also muses of mercy dropping
like the gentle rain.
While I, devoid of arrogance,
See yearnings and unions met with stones all about.
The relentless rain covering the earth with tears of wet grief.
Those who pick away at briars and rags
Born outside of Love and bread,
Like fragments fraying from the proper center
Niggled away in fruitless effort.
What have the planets told us,
That but by fear of absolute disaster,
Gravity cannot be misused.
Day by day, who but can feel the absence
Of the Great one, who has not instructed his children,
Those ignorant of education,
That attractions, movement, and purpose,
Need a center of gravity on earth’s intentions.
Being too simple to find the peaceful vortex
Calling unheard to the Determinant one to reconsider
And explain why each is lost, yes, each,
And in the multitude’s need, as need of life itself
To be told of gravity’s laws in society
And to behold at once the force of the stars.

That
Nameless and Indefinable
To be referred to as that
Beyond the indeterminate and the determinate
Called and calling, without a name,
That is carried about by all people
Accompanying all, nameless, it cannot be denied
It is there, silent, watching
Giving power to slow measured attitudes
Just, compassionate, without tears or punishment
It stares back from the core of art, indefinable.
Those works with categorical labels,
And those works without categorical labels,
In the everyday life of everyone.
It is there, it is THAT.
Each that has the privilege of being unique
Therefore unproven, uncommandable
It’s will being it’s own,
It is the largesse to mankind, free,
Multiple mysteries’ child
It eludes all captors
And proves the single powers
Of muted, and silenced humanity.

The Problem
Between the ancient “I” and the clairvoyant eye – myself and myself
There are farewells without notification
Immeasurable exuberances, mythic passions
The arm and the blood; Greek Tragedy in every household.
Between the ancient “I” and the clairvoyant eye
There arise disputed longings
Vague and uneasy goodbyes.
The moon parts with its longings disseminating into waves
Easing off memories of split circles of impossible deeds,
Dante without synchronicity.

Who has witnessed the beginnings of the Formidable Equipoise?
Or has seen that galaxy beyond our own
Presided over by a new and different God?
The little Fathers of Rain then, their hurts within
Yet giving their poise to others?
Who are they who lend a handshake to the misbegotten?
They who know the morning stars as friends.

So let gravity attract in equal measure.
Forget the cavern of Terrible Gods.
Paint light through a prism. The colors?
The colors run in the veins from the cosmos,
And say what you will, mythologically,
I know the ancient blood of a new friend

Four Exiles From Europe
Mexico 1943
To begin again! To begin again!
Out of the fount of their genetic dreams
What they remembered as the hope of their own soil
Was pervaded with a new thing outside their blood:
The new strange soil, and under it,
Rising like sounds from the earth.
The primitive force, Aztec drums,
The thrust of a psyche, rich and exotic.
The actively expressed psyche, open to see and hear.
For them, it was an apparition Regarded as a Nouveau Riche of the Soul, nothing more.
Unlike their brilliant refinements.
To this Native Force they would not, could not, unite.
The naive and credulous are humble natives
And change their tragedy from impotence
To its twin, guilt, mysteriously linked in their minds.
So the European, out of touch, substituted pride for impotence.
Their minds frozen, too stunned in the new land to gain scope.
To begin again! To begin again!
In their minds, the Surrealists could see
A similarity with Freud’s freed libido and the Aztec force.
Neither could they touch the Aztec Force, nor would they

The Mouth of the Shadow I
The mouth of hunger
The mouth of desire.
Needs, consumed or unconsumed
Leave their shadow
The shadow in the psyche,
Needful, then satisfied
Changing, always felt,
Delicious or drought honored in hunger.
Beyond that shadow is God’s curtain.
There we may join the rhythm of his tall palms
And roll in peace, quietly, as on celestial wheels.
For in that found place
Time is a suspended interval
And Light casts no shadows for the hungry heart. 

Friend
The distance between you and me was very great
But we were tied beyond age, intellect, nationality
Or the flesh, God knows why.
Even distance of continents held no limits,
The bond was unbelievable, and undisputed.
Now that you are gone, the new kind of distance is questionable.
At first friendship I could but suffer, from my continent to yours,
And I groped for a hand in space.
Over the years that was overcome,
But now, I truly do not know where you are.
There is simply a distance of another kind
And I must learn to trust in advanced sources
Unknown to me and yet to mankind unknown.
God will not wheel Himself in, into your place.
But he is watching slowly, imperceptibly,
As light covers all distances with the speed of Grace.

Handmaids at the Mills of Time
Handmaids at the Mills of Time,
Time were it but for you,
We might have felt for all ages and long ago
That our blood surge belonged to us alone
Yet it never belongs to any of us
Who felt to be commander or creator?
For safety’s sake, if for that alone
We must at all times remember to give Time its due respect
As the barometer of the necessity for humility
For Time, calling out our life span,
Commands to be listened to in attentive obedience
And therein humility is linked into life’s hope,
Being subjected to what seems to be
The indeterminate wishes of a powerful God.
So men are united to time in bondage
Of unfitting docility
Put in place by the act of being
Imposed on from without.
Since the great Creator speaks ultimately
Of more than gravity, motion, attractions, or posterity
As the last word on Life,
Seeing that time and the love of peoples
Shall never be that glory which stands Silent and still

The Color of Gravity
When into space I stretch out my hand to you
And you respond in kind
We are not unlike the planets
In the action of their molecules, and ours the same.
Standing apart yet within the limits of gravity’s attractions
We can sing with the Morning Star.
However, within our spheres I see color,
Violets in crescendo, reds riding, a whirling green
My interior palette speaks of projected other worlds.
What is it that is known to myself alone and yet unknown,
The mystery of power, my own, whose source
I dare not fathom
Lest enveloped in a label and confined as a record,
That source should flee.
So I look out to the planets’ thrilling power
With a sly sad ennui, a lack perhaps
Thinking on the paradox of distant knowledge
That I cannot know, or what will be,
And I ponder on the color of gravity

Beyond Our Galaxy
To those of us who only think we know
In what ways our obedience to God
Will bring us close to a greater glory
Alas, the world intrudes
Upon our imagination.
We who in our intimate silences
Chance upon a glimmer of Him
Yet would like to see what other God
Is situated in an outer galaxy
Beyond the God we know.
By what alphabetical block, like children
We learn another kind of building
And structures of cybernetic astronomy; ions,
Give a clue to a world beyond worlds.
Of whom, this time, one does truly fear and tremble
That that new world and its God, we hope
Whose meaning to us is yet oblique
Will hold us tighter and more dear,
And his embrace be won
By the words, comprehend us all

The Moon in The Earth. The Earth In The Moon
The silvery cry of the yearning of bells has to float by
Sounding solid, passing past events doomed to ethereal consideration.
The moon in the earth, the earth in the moon.
Crucial events set up as a glance while in orbit
Balanced in the serene smile of the pale and powerful moon.
In space, there are balanced orbs, neighbors
Of more erratic, harsh places,
Lovers in hostile abnegation.
But the moon is hung in webs of light
By a resolute and fiery sun.
It keeps its distance.
Its mighty involvement in the earth, an echo of its cousin orb.
By it, the cousin plunges into the soil with the plough
Its night light fingers through every blade of grass
Echoing birth and desire, desire and birth,
It pulls and parts the earth and the water into waves
“Leaving you, leaving you, I am leaving you in the moonlight.”
The silver toes of foam depart.
I shall till you with desire when I arise again.
For staying in the plenitude of love, you will remember how I can leave you.
The moon in the earth, the earth in the moon.
Into the turf and soil splitting the hours of light
Reaching, rising, to join what I celebrate, that which has gone.
Moon, by your departure all life pulls and grows
To join, to join again.
This is the love of the planets
And in their orbit and attraction, this is the love of man.
Standing straight in gravity in the heart of sunlight
Aloof from the serene and departing moon
Listen to the yearning of the earth and the flutes of stars.
Wherein to despise, small and puny powers more’s the pity

Sweeter Days On Earth
Your lonely origins in the mountains of Indian Kings
Carried my like dignity
And it became my throne of metamorphosis.
In the rim of the drum of your ancientness
I recognized the future of your newness
I argued your case before the Gods
As though I were the purveyor of your creation
And the witness to the act of your birth.
You likewise perceived the axis
Upon which was founded
The uniqueness of the drama of my soul.
In the panorama of our recognition
We earned the word matrimony at birth
For our union meant that we were the natural elect
Uniquely entitled to visit
The protected conclusions of our vulnerable goodness.
So we sat in peace at night
Our dreams were the same
A joint elixir of honey and adventure.
We saw the soul of Christ
Bonded into the bodily hope
Of synchronicities of sweeter days on Earth

Immeasurable Instant
I have measured your worth by your disdain
Time halts, crippled.
I have measured your love by your hate
Time swings inevitable
What I couldn’t measure was the light
That held you there, silent, still.
For which you never had to hunger
For an imitation of God’s rapture.

Ghosts
It has rained the residues of my shadow.
Ghosts rising up, ghosts laid down
In pools of paint,
Live among my brushes and canvas
Like personages in confrontation of
What was not confronted,
In life and in turn, in dreams.
Dreams rushing in, to pour on paper
Posing as humor
Or singing their inverse protests
Spread onto canvas.
I cannot sleep studio-prone near you
Within your perimeter-less perimeters,
You tall white dictators,
Who leave me Only at your own volition.

At 89. Fall Comes Before It’s Time
When fall comes before it’s time,
The Summer lightning brings a sudden chill from the North,
The shoulders are brought up alert, cold,
And electric roots are felt in the feet.
Summer equipoise becomes precipitation, running straight to the head,
The head knows the feet, the feet become the earth,
But everywhere gravity’s pull has tensed,
And Time itself has hesitated before a green stop or a red start,
Looking at heavenly electricity as the wonder
Of a future Sudden and unknown.
O Future, born with a chill, welcoming the natural and alerting the supernatural.
Oh, my supernatural husband, why have you gone before your time, at only 89! And the Earth and the sky separated,
Blind to both, I run on the shore
Crazy, with winter in the summertime

Velasco
Out of the mountains and snowy heights of Andean air,
Thin, pure, you had access to a bell-clear world.
So you had lived in the desireless desire of God.
In white gravity, Suspended in the nearness of balanced orbs.
You confronted the still and silent angelic.
Out of the mountains and the valley below
Where you brought your music so likened to the long husky-voiced Samponas, mountain flutes, Echoing the intuition of orbs,
They thought that a star had birthed
But you were to bear that base earth, waiting
Yet with notes written on snow.
You were its culture, tied irrevocably to your people.
You never saw the faults of the mestizo Soul.
Dove of peace you were, led by others,
To impose your music as a gift of purity before man
Driven away by the mestizo,
You had no blame for others.
Leaving like Halley’s comet,
You sought without falling, ever.
From the mountains,
You made men sing
Of the Sea of Christ’s delight

Leaving
I do not know if it is true or not,
lf, hypnotized when the wing of death took you
And I thought you had left
Also had left with your love and mine
And now your love is neither past nor present
Nor on high or low.
Seeming myself to be bereft only’,
The love of the two yet exists,
I carry it, nor is it irradiant.
If it cries, it shines, nurtured in my breast,
For whom should it be hid;
Though now I guard it as mine alone;
Such a light of mercies,
For what cause, for what effect?

The Fakir of Agra
A rickshaw cart of children, pushing along a dusty road,
Dust Stirred up by oxen carrying along tons of brooms, swaying,
They came on in a packed and steady Stream,
Over the hill, on bicycles of intention, in plenitude of action.
But I, savoring love through mutual eyelashes,
Theirs and mine, quick eyes of miraculous recognition,
Go alone into the quiet place the Fakir sought;
There he was, half in the sky,
Levitated against the world’s pain,
For in the place he held, the tips of nails
And the doom of pain touched him not.
Outside a place of fixed gravities,
Where the stars were blinking in molecular duty,
The Fakir held his independence.

The Paradox of Forces or Gravity Defies Grace
As soon as you love me with your Soul,
Or with that which is your intimate and unique aptness,
You will leave me.
For you cannot live in love without substance.
Please love me only in part with your soul.
For Gravity defies Grace.
Gravity does not measure its attractions.
It is inevitable.
Grace, in Truth, is less permanent.
For Grace is voluntary.
But the aim of all love is also Grace.
The hazard of Gravity is that its laws are locked in Nature.
It is charted and played out by its own laws — mysterious.
As the Spaniards say, ”What is, is. ” or ”What is not, is not. ”
Given to St. Francis at birth was his freedom, the gift of Grace.
Yet one can voluntarily set the climate in which to be reborn in Grace.
Alas, nothing can be done about Gravity.
For within my strong passion, I am subject
To hazards of a road beyond my present knowing.
Grace, you may surely vacillate on the pedestals on which you stand.
To evoke your shining presence, one can consider and reconsider.
A talent you are, Grace, but revocable.
Stay with me then, stubborn Gravity, in which I believe.
And though I risk a destiny of proportions
of a stricken and striking atavistic mythology,
I believe in you, Nature
One has pride and awe of that which is unequivocal