I am not (yet) proficient in Spanish. I shall have the Spanish in the poem checked by a professor when I return to Green Valley, AZ.
The Apparition of Heaven
1st Iteration…English Version
In Memoriam, Floyd Russell Taylor
Everyone was leaving to go back North.
They knew this vividness was coming, here.
But the lure to go home,
Home, and reincarnate past memories
Of the greening, there,
The budding, there,
Such a lure was too instinctually rooted.
They left.
I stayed.
Now, from day to week, from here to there and back,
While I walked, it was a welling
From the earth to the sky,
From the sky to the stars.
It was as beautiful as a Spanish name.
Thus, the illusion that it came for me became
Too irrationally rooted.
Esteban Dorado. Esteban.
If I stopped walking, a small cactus at my feet
Bloomed a single flower, a well for the color red.
I passed the cups colored rose that grew on spiny plates,
Their rosiness conflicted by yellow stamens.
If I turned around, at my feet bloomed a singular white.
Arrested by flowers, I lit a candle at Mass.
“Jesus, walk beside me.”
Nonetheless, I came as one alone
To a gate of the kingdom of heaven.
How great that gate. But how apart that place.
I stood. I looked inside. I witnessed a palo verde tree
Be swept by a seep of the color yellow.
Its trunk a glowing green, upon its crown,
Specks of yellow bloom rioted in the sun gusts,
Until they floated their shimmer through the rarefied air.
At the dead end, looming like a leading question,
Massed the high but permeable walls of oleander,
A writhing riot of red, of rose, of white.
Birds flitted through the colors, not a sight but a sound.
They were singing of a happiness in Spanish,
While rays glowed yellow, just beyond the oleander.
“Will you not forsake this sorrowful search?
You are human, the flowering of God upon the earth,
Beneath the stars.
God awaits you. Your divinity awaits you.”
I turned away.
It wasn’t God who I was seeking.
Once again, I walk the ordinary world alone,
Without a clue to you, the extraordinary.
A passage in an early poem of yesteryear reappears,
As if it were a vow to be renewed.
“Renew the search for a lost, fabled love.
Track its signs
Through every waste of the world.
Do not be deterred by an elusiveness,
Or the sabotage of others,
For this is your purpose,
And when finally embraced, your paradise.”
(Gamelan, 1st Iteration, 2007)
I am tempted to write:
At my beginning, I shouted a hope from my heart,
Then, listened as it echoed its glory into the stars.
Instead, nearer the mark:
As to my beginning, a highly uncertain person read his heart,
Then, imagined words worthy to be breathed beneath a starry light.
“May I sing with the Great.”
Entering my ending, still hear me singing.
But, now, I shall sing in the language of happiness.
Renovar la búsqueda de un amor perdido y legendario.
Sigue sus señales
A través de cada desperdicio del mundo.
No te dejes disuadir por una elusividad,
O el sabotaje de los demás,
Porque este es tu propósito,
Y cuando finalmente abrazado, tu paraíso.
Resolute, with respect I remember mi madre;
She could whistle her lonesome along.
Be that as it may, I pray: “Jesus…Camino a su lago.”
Steven Golden
Commenced, May 14th, 2024
Completed, August 15th, 2024.
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