Biography (The Introduction)
Strip me bare like the land
Sacred and unprotected
That you come to claw and tear
To hold its sparkle
In the ostentation of your hand
For man is more than spectacle
And I am more than
Just a sum of atoms,
Or a bit among the pieces of the plan
Mine me for all the gold I am
It is a great project
Memory writing imagination
To immortalize the castle in the sand
The salt tongue of sea
Have shaped like a human hand.
I shall learn too
Rocks like a metaphor for my strength.
Only bring not those productions here
Machines crawling
Into my skin
Gnawing me with caterpillar teeth
Of a psychological reality
Of the Aryan world
Leave Sigmund and Karl
In the bleachers to wait with me
For the expedition that shall be
A better paradigm than El'Dorado
Those are superficial oars
Too narrow the scope of vision
To plow and dissect
The TransAtlantic triangle
Of my reduction
To a stage of history
The savage
Unthankful for its civilization
Making the cosmology of the soul.
I am more rock
Than a caterpillar can feed.
And it, before it flies
Against the glittering sun
Is more paradigm
Than you excavate from a pun.
Strip me bare like the land
This limited space in time
Shall tell
The expanding universe of days
Not a new beginning
But a slow Columbus world
Coming to the reality
Of a preexistence beyond
Mere sensation
Laid out like cloth
Upon the table of the mind.
Cloth, you say
Another precursory thing to rag
O had you seen it
Form like cotter on the head
Or turban, or mat
Or sheet upon the bed
It carries babies too
Close to the fountain of its milk
But cloth, before all that
Woven and waiting for the design
Functional in service
And still a canvas of history
Only an ancient African understands.
Cloth you take off to change the landscape
That body stands naked in its innate beauty
Despite the loss of soil and trees
Cloth shed like skin
Before we enter into the river
I from Darien look and shiver
At the sight of the newcomer
Standing like a Drake
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