Meditações - into the foam of time

Time Zones

Time is crying upon the backs of lizards,

Through the white stone of the medieval city

They dash.

The houses that are walking up the stairs,

Flowers out of ruins,

Further into the fortress,

The sounds of a language registers

In our dreams.

 

Words which are my hat in the city,

Coming through the bamboo

The shadows of lost meaning—

Tilted light making slivers

Through the forest of the mambo

Behind the eyes.

 

Time will shine your head into skull

The circle song will come again and again,

If we forget how to lay out a village,

Just open a guayaba in half,

These seeds are perfect,

And can guide you back,

Your hands the electric of the ghosts.

 

In the Persia of shining alfombras,

A belly button silks upon a horse,

Enters a tent of rhythms,

Makes the trees dance into shape,

Rubén Darío saw them in the river,

Bathing in the echoes of the castles,

His Indio head,

Clean enough to measure

The tempo of a camel,

The first string that vibrated

The Rock of Gibraltar,

To sway Greco-Roman lips,

Arising fire of Gypsy song,

Was making Castile dress and undress,

With the sounds that were hitting the moon

And falling down unto earth as colors.

 

Of boats that were my shoes.

Atlantic chachachá.

Splicing through 101st Street brick.

Which covered dancing verdure green

Rectangular mangos,

Cylindric bananas

Sounds in the sky blue tropic: mind.

 

Trees are making maracas

That will soon make you dance.

 

Water is their god of cadence,

As I sea walk through coconut heights,

Legs of tamarind,

Purple orchids arranged like syllables,

Insects of the morning dew sting verses on café.

In embroidery of Italians,

Garcilaso came to José Martí,

Who ducked Spanish spies

In Manhattan

And hugged Walt Whitman’s beard in Philadelphia

As the Cuban Habaneras’ Shango

Made it south to tango.

 

Boats are ages sailing on water,

Parrots are flying out of castanets,

Flamenco peeling pineapples

That go up the river,

The water that became El Quijote’s language,

As a cane field disappears into a bottle,

To awake in a little town

With molasses orbiting the cathedral,

A wooden saint slicing through the

Mountain full of potassium radiation,

Slanted plátanos pointing into medieval

Liturgy,

Bongo and ocean waves carving

Phantasmal antiquity

Through the fabulous language

That has taken the shape of

An Andalusian rhyming door,

One after the other.

Perfume pagano

Sailing out of the archways,

As Ricardo Ray turns into a centipede,

Marching across a Brooklyn piano,

For dancers to Sanskrit their

Gypsy feet,

Upon Albaicín ceramic tile.

Caribbean sun melts the caramel,

Making our first national flag:

White skirts waving  in the air.

Machetes taking off like helicopters

Chopping off branches for timbale sticks,

The hands of the sun hitting the

Moon like a drum—

Making the atmosphere of moisture

Heat up,

For the chorus of the song

To come back down upon us polinizando

The carnival flower,

A serenade walkilipiando.

 

Sliding upon seashells,

That disappear into the foam of time,

One age living next to another,

We are both living things at once,

We are the cadaver that is

About to be born.

Victor Hernandez Cruz