Full moon: Moon Over Union Square

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Luna sobre Union Square

para Karen y Paul

Pagando respetos al Gandhi de bronce en su jardín encerrado; pasando los muchachos y muchachas ocupados en su cortejo, su rondas, sus vagares o lo que quieras; miro a la luna de la cosecha más allá del neón rojo deletreando “Union Square.” Su luz, un tanto comprometida por las luces de los edificios y las calles, baña a los árboles de la plaza en plata suave, acaricia las caras de l@s jóvenes (y de todo mundo) con un toque tierno. En medio de la bulla todo es pacífico y me imagino que así lo es, en este momento, por toda esta ciudad de Nueva York, esta nación, este mundo.

Pero solamente por un momento, el más breve de momentos, más corto que ahora; la paz plateada de la luna más difícil de imaginar en la forma encogida del hombre desamparado en su cobija hecha garras y sucia acostado al lado del bote de basura en la Calle 17 una cuadra de aquí, en el asalto sucediendo en otra parte de la ciudad, en el bombardeo y balaceo en otra parte del mundo.

Todo es perfecto, dicen; Dios, dicen, es todo bueno — allá en la galaxia, entre los billones de galaxias, los billones de billones de estrellas. Pero nosotros en la orilla más lejana de la Vía Láctea, más pequeño de los planetas sostenido por una estrella menor, vemos a la luna y en nuestro corazón de corazones sabemos que el bien y el mal son las cosas que sufrimos, peculiares a nosotros, tales como los son nuestros dioses. Y la luna — tal vez ni buena ni mala, mas bella de todos modos — rueda sobre Union Square y alrededor de la Tierra — y alrededor de nuestro mundo confuso.

© Rafael Jesús González 2008

Moon Over Union Square

for Karen & Paul

Paying my respects to the bronze Gandhi in his fenced-in garden; past the boys and girls busy in their courting, cruising, hanging or what will you; I gaze at the harvest moon beyond the red neon spelling “Union Square.” Her light, somewhat compromised by the lights of the buildings and the streets, bathes the trees of the square in soft silver, caresses the faces of the youths (and everyone’s else) with a tender touch. In the midst of the bustle all is peaceful, and I imagine it is so, at this moment, throughout this city of New York, this nation, this world.

But just for a moment, the briefest of moments, shorter than now; the silver peace of the moon harder to imagine on the huddled form of the homeless man in his shredded and grimy blanket lying beside the dumpster on 17th Street a block away, the mugging going on in another part of the city, the bombings and shootings in another part of the world.

All is perfection, they say, God, they say, is all good – there in the galaxy, among the billions of galaxies, the billions of billions of stars. But we at the outermost edge of the Milky Way, tiniest of planets held by a minor star, look at the moon and in our heart of hearts know that good and evil are the things we suffer, peculiar to us, just as are our gods. And the moon — perhaps neither good nor evil, but lovely nevertheless — rolls over Union Square and around the Earth — and round our confused world.

© Rafael Jesús González 2008

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Columbus Day

-October 12 is a feast-day known in various regions and times by many names: Columbus Day, Discovery Day, Hispanic Culture Day, Day of the Americas, Day of the Race, Day of the Indigenous Peoples.

In Mexico in 1928 at the insistence of the philosopher José Vasconcelos, then Minister of Education, it was named Día de la Raza (Day of the Race), denomination of the Iberian-American Union in 1913 to declare a new identity formed by the encounter of the Spaniards with the native peoples of the Americas. In 1902, the Mexican poet Amado Nervo had written a poem in honor of the President Benito Juárez (a Zapoteca Indian), which he read in the House of Representatives, titled Raza de Bronce (Race of Bronze) praising the indigenous race, title which later in 1919 the Bolivian author Alcides Arquedas would give his book. Bronze (noble metal amalgamated of various metals) came to be metaphor for mestizaje (the mixing of the races.) According to the thinking of Vasconcelos, a Cosmic Race, the race of the future, is the noble race that is formed in the Americas since October 12, 1492, the race of mestizaje, an amalgam of the indigenous races of the Americas, the Europeans, the Africans, the Asians, the world — in a word, the human race made of a mixture of all the races which Vasconcelos called the Cosmic Race.

But that this race is formed at great cost to the indigenous American race (and to the African race brought here as slaves) cannot be ignored. Since 2002, in Venezuela the feast-day is called Día de la Resistencia Indígena (Day of Indigenous Resistance.)

Be that as it may, by whatever name we give it, however way we cut it, it is the same cake — the date commemorates the arrival of the Europeans to America (which for them was a “new world”), not a visit but an invasion, a genocide, a subjugation of the peoples of that “new world” which we know today by the name of a European cartographer who never set foot on the sacred ground of the continents that bear his name. What the date marks is a continuous colonization, exploitation, abuse, outrage of the indigenous peoples of the Americas that has never lessened, that has persisted these five-hundred-sixteen years.

It could well be called Day of Globalization. Since that date, the Earth is concretely, definitively proven to be truly round, a sphere, a ball, a globe. And from that date is imposed by force upon the indigenous American peoples a quite strange (in my view, mistaken) cosmology, attitude toward life, toward the Earth, toward economics, toward the sacred, toward the human being him/herself — a single truth narrow and intolerant, a rapacious disdain toward the Earth seen only as a resource to be exploited, a concept of progress difficult to distinguish from greed and the lust for power.

The cause of the indigenous peoples screams for justice: their lands, their fields continue to be stolen from them, destroyed for their valuable woods and minerals; their agricultural creations, such as maize and the potato, which have saved a great part of the world from famine, are modified at the molecular level and controlled by rapacious corporations; their traditional medicines are patented by those same corporations; sacred water is privatized and stolen from them; even their right to their own beliefs and cultures is not respected. Even putting justice aside, we should all ally ourselves with the indigenous peoples of the Americas (and of the entire world) in their resistance against such abuse because what threatens them threatens us all throughout the whole world — and the Earth itself. They have a very much to teach us about a healthy relationship of humankind with the Earth.

In an Earth much smaller and more fragile than we imagined, we find ourselves in full globalization and struggle against the imposition of an unbridled capitalism and the fascism, its logical extension, that accompanies it. The indigenous resistance that has never ceased these five centuries and some continues in spite of a brutal repression and now all of us of the cosmic race, of pure necessity, must align ourselves with their struggle, for that struggle is ours if we are to survive on the Earth, holy mother of our race, the human race — and of all our relations, the other animals, the plants, the minerals. On the round, seamless Earth all borders are fictitious and what threatens one threatens all. To think otherwise is not only immoral but insane.

© Rafael Jesús González 2007

Berkeley, California, October 12, 2008

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Of Color & Light

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Of Color and Light

When he was five, some neighbors, moving away, left Ramón and his little brother Antonio a dog house with a peaked roof and a door rounded on the top and a square window. It was a large, sturdy, dog house and if he stood in the middle there was even a little room to spare.

Ramón's father was often away. José Filiberto Gutiérrez made the family living by selling school supplies, brilliantine, pomade, olive oil, threads and other notions and novelties in distant little places called Canutillo, Deming, Fabens, Fresnillo, Mesilla, Mimbres, Santa Rita, Silver City. He called himself J. F. Gutiérrez & Co. The company part, Ramón concluded, were his mother Clara and his grandmother and grandfather, aunts and uncles who affixed the labels on the little bottles of brilliantine, red (scented with roses) and yellow (scented with jasmine.)

There were always bottles about the house: the flat, fluted bottles used for the brilliantine, the slender bottles with a bulb at the top and a bulb at the bottom used for the olive oil, and others of more or less interesting shapes. Ramón loved these bottles sometimes more but never less than he did his large box of Crayolas whose fine points he jealously guarded and which smelled like no blessed church candle ever could. His father even built him shelves in the dog house so Ramón could arrange his favorite bottles.

One of those god-inspired days of the desert just after Easter when the sun is an alloy of silver and gold, Ramón snuck from the house while his brother and mother slept the siesta. He took with him some bright crepe-paper flowers his mother had given him and some egg-coloring tablets he'd hoarded from the Holy Saturday past. Another treasure, these egg-coloring pills, large and glued to a sheet of paper with instructions, in English so he could not make out even one word. But he knew anyway. He loved the infusions they made and their smell in water and vinegar and how they stained the white china cups in which the eggs were dipped. And he always objected when his mother or father insisted on emptying them into the kitchen sink, careful not to splatter the white porcelain.

Ramón filled all his bottles with water from the back yard hose and forced crumbs of egg-coloring and pellets of crepe-paper down their tight throats. Some he was careful to keep pure of contamination one by another. With some he experimented, though he knew some things to avoid. (He had learned he must keep the egg-colors he hoarded dry, for if water got to them strange things happened: some lovely strange as when green was touched with blue, but some just plain boring strange like when purple ran into yellow.)

After he finished, he arranged all his bottles (with the years they grew to hundreds) on the shelves his father had made him and he stood back near the far corner by the dog house door. And time stopped. As we know it does on god-inspired days. And the light came in just right. As it does when light is an epiphany. And it poured through all those colors in the bottles and he knew them to be more pure than the stained glass windows at 11:00 o'clock mass.

*...... *...... *

Later this became a measure for happiness mixed up with other things: the happiest moments with his father, his mother, his brothers; his grandmother's laugh; a stolen moment of drunkenness in the Navy hospital X-ray room with his best buddy; cutting psychology class with his love Genoveva (Genny to their gringo friends); the tea ceremony, years later, with his other love Doris.

And with his ambitions. He would be a painter and in his fifteenth year, on a pilgrimage to the Basílica de Guadalupe, drunk on murals, he promised her a painting for one of her side altars. But, no, his mother and father gave him to understand, this was not realistic. Okay, he said, pharmacy, thinking it was chemistry that drew him. But it was probably the flasks, vials, alembics, retorts filled with potions, infusions, syrups, tinctures, elixirs, each differently colored, to be arranged on the drug store shelves. He confused the healing for the color and after high school decided pharmacy was not ambitious enough so he set out to become a doctor—and perhaps a priest to boot. After the navy, college completed, when he was accepted to medical school he decided instead to teach—and to write.

And it took many, many years later for him to suspect that at the roots of his being a poet was the patience of cramming pastilles and bits of crepe-paper into the narrow mouths of brilliantine bottles full of water so that the precise and diffuse colors would bleed against the light.

© Rafael Jesús González 2008


(MIRRORS BENEATH THE EARTH, anthology of short fiction;
Ray González, Ed.; Curbstone Press, 1992; author’s copyrights.)

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Ché

----------Ché

----Ernesto Guevara de la Serna

------------14/6/28 – 9/10/67


Entre el acero y el oro
en la escuela de la higuera
se apagó
---(apagaron)
una rosa de llamas;
segaron una azucena
------hecha roja de sangre,
un corazón ancho y profundo
y a la vez intratable, endurecido,
de una terrible ternura,
de una compasión violenta,
adicto a la justicia;
sanador de medicina amarga
que frente al ultraje
amartilló el bisturí
------en bayoneta,
fervoroso cirujano
de cánceres sociales.
Le cortaron las manos;
de las balas en su cuerpo
brotó el mito
y la palabra ‘Revolución’
recobró nuevo lustre
-----nuevo tinte.

Su epitafio, el lema:
‘Hasta la victoria siempre.’



------© Rafael Jesús González 2008

by Alberto Korda

----------Che

----Ernesto Guevara de la Serna

----------------6/14/28 – 10/9/67


Between steel & gold
in the school of the fig
was extinguished,
-----(they extinguished)
a rose of flames;
cut down a lily
----made red with blood,
a heart wide & deep
& at once intractable, hardened,
of a terrible tenderness,
of a violent compassion,
addicted to justice;
healer of bitter medicine
who in the face of outrage
hammered the scalpel
-----into bayonet,
earnest surgeon
of social cancers.
They cut off his hands;
from the bullets in his body
bloomed the myth
& the word ‘Revolution’
took on a new luster
------new color.

His epitaph, the motto:
‘Until victory forever.’



------© Rafael Jesús González 2008
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invitation to a reading in New York

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Pandemonium Press

Doorknobs & BodyPaint with riverbabble
invite you
to celebrate the publication of
Doorknobs & BodyPaint
Fantastic Flash Fiction
An Anthology
at a
Launch, Publication Party, & Reading
Saturday, October 18, 2008, 2-5 PM

Roy Arias Theatre Center

Payan Theatre

300 West 43rd Street, 5th Floor
(located on 43rd Street off 8th Avenue)

New York, NY 10036

Introduction: Leila Rae

Special Guest: Rafael Jesús González

MC: Bara Swain

Readers:

Sam Barasch
Georgina Bates
Paul Beckman
Margot Comstock
Joyce Daniels
Christopher Davis
Marjorie Carlson Davis
Michael Maiello
Rich Pearl
Leila Rae
Olivia Roric
Jen Rubins
Bara Swain
Francine Witte

DVD Presentation:
Colleen Neumann
Sharon Wachsler


Open Mic
open to anyone published in either
Doorknobs & BodyPaint
or
riverbabble


light refreshments will be served

free & open to the public
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Tlatelolco

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---------------Tlatelolco


Montículo de arena de tres mundos,
antiguo mercado del imperio
donde el águila que cae
fue guía de hombres
y que el viento cubre,
hace cuarenta otoños que
cuando los juegos de los dioses
que la paz trajeran vinieron
a tu tierra, los violaste
derramando la sangre
de tus propios hijos,
muchos de sus nombres
ya enterrados en los calabozos
de la tortura, fosas incógnitas, perdidas.
Pero se guarda la llaga en la memoria,
la herida que no sana,
la cicatriz terca en la historia.


------------------© Rafael Jesús González 2008


El masacre de Tlatelolco, o La noche de Tlatelolco, tomó lugar la tarde y noche del 2 de octubre 1968 en la Plaza de las Tres Culturas en la parte de Tlatelolco de la Ciudad de México diez días antes de las celebraciones de los Juegos Olímpicos en la Ciudad de México, cuando hombres con armas y militares balacearon a los estudiantes que manifestaban. El número de los muertos, heridos y desaparecidos varían de los cientos a los miles; el gobierno se niega a dar números exactos. El responsable del genocidio fue Gustavo Díaz Ordaz.




------------Tlatelolco


Mound of sand of three worlds,
ancient market of the empire
where the falling eagle
was guide of men
& that the wind covers,
it has been forty falls that
when the gods’ games
that would bring peace came
to your land, you desecrated
them with spilling the blood
of your own children,
many of their names
now buried in the dungeons
of torture, graves unknown & lost.
But the sore is kept in memory,
the wound that will not heal,
the stubborn scar in history.


----------© Rafael Jesús González 2008


The Tlatelolco Massacre, also known as The Night of Tlatelolco, took place on the afternoon and night of October 2, 1968, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City, ten days before the 1968 Olympics celebrations in Mexico City, when men with guns and military shot student demonstrators. The number of the dead, wounded, and disappeared vary from hundreds to thousands; the government has refused to release exact figures. The one responsible for the massacre was Gustavo Díaz Ordaz.
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Tashlikh

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------------Tashlikh

These are the days of awe —
time of inventory
-----and a new beginning
when harvest of what we sowed
-----comes in.
(What have we sown
------of discord & terror?
Where have we fallen short
------of justice?)

The scales dip & teeter;
there is so much
to discard,
so much to atone.

When our temples stood
we loaded a goat
-----with our transgressions
----------and sent it to the wild.
Now we must search our pockets
for crumbs of our trespasses,
our sins to cast upon the rivers.

The days are upon us
-----to take stock of our hearts.
----------It is time to dust
the images of our household gods,
-----our teraphim,
----------------------our lares.



-------© Rafael Jesús González 2008


(Arabesques Review, vol. 3 no . 3, 2007; author’s copyrights)



---------------Tashlikh

Estos son los días de temor —
tiempo del inventario
-----y un nuevo comienzo
cuando la cosecha de lo que sembramos
-----entra.
(¿Qué hemos sembrado
------de discordia y terror?
¿Dónde hemos fallado
-------en la justicia?)

Las balanzas se inclinan y columpian;
hay tanto de que deshacerse,
tanto por lo cual expiar.

Cuando estaban en pie nuestros templos
cargábamos una cabra
-----con nuestros pecados
----------y la echábamos al desierto.
Ahora tenemos que buscar en los bolsillos
las migas de nuestras faltas,
nuestros pecados para echarlos a los ríos.

Están sobre nosotros los días
-----para hacer inventario del corazón.
----------Es tiempo de sacudir
las imagines de nuestros dioses domésticos,
------nuestros térafim,
---------------------------nuestros lares.



----------------© Rafael Jesús González 2008


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