I brought all these books
to read, thinking
in them I will find
something?
—but already around me,
atop leaves sweetly
floating in a green breeze,
already about me,
shimmering along cicada wings,
already within me,
swirling
in a whirlpool
of fight,
light,
and sex
is the knowledge
of life.
It falls freely and abundantly.
You sit in so many different places, in a park, in an office, in a subway, in a car. The scenes around you change, like maelstroms, like rapids, and yet the center remains. The eye is fixed, and it watches, and somehow in that watching, what solidifies the eye and differentiates it from the transience, also begins to change. Mountains once the pinnacle of awe become speedbumps on a road, and what used to stain the heart with disdain earns paternal empathy. The eye that watches becomes the eye of change, and seer and scene move adjacent to one another. It’s a dance, a dance of becoming, where the theme that drives the rounding and bending and turning and leaping does not end, instead ebbs and softens then hardens, quiets then explodes—and there is only beginning. You are a continuum, and when you reach a hand to touch the handrail, you are the cool metal turned heat and the pumping of blood within every artery of animal life. The pigeon that flies overhead is the freedom between your temples that millions around the world cry out for as they are crushed by the immense weight of your boot. How like a stampede you are, through rain slicked neon streets, through dry dead grass patched earth, through glades in the hearts of forests that circulate with red ants carrying the nutrients of a day left hot and shivering after the sex of life and death. The lamb is born, and with it the sin, and on the mountain meditates a Hindu monk that knows the letters that make up your name. It is his name as well, and that of she who lives at the base, the base of your desires and dreams and despair, and in the mirror shares your face. And somehow, with all this change around and within you, you sit, here, there, and everywhere, reading this.
I was lamenting again
my poverty, the conditions
that reduced my world into blocks and hoods,
and still today cuts boys and girls down
before their legs begin to take root.
I was lamenting
but then I saw the sparrows,
brown puffs of play
in the dirt, darting and twittering away.
Imagine, all of this suffering bursting
out of me like a diseased tree,
threatening to bury the sky and its night,
and the few stars the kids in the projects can see.
How selfish of me.
But the sparrows came,
and they played
with nothing but dirt;
they played,
and for that day, at least,
I and the world were saved.
I will always be here, a stone of the world,
but you will move on
as the wind moves on
as the seasons move on
as the stars and the night move on
and disperse into various
clouds and ideas and desires
and you will move on
as everyone does
as every child
moves from womb into world into death
and death into matter into fetus
and passion into boredom into despair
and into new embraces of arms between legs around waists
and you will sit for a while
and you will move
on but I
will always be here, a stone of the world.