Un demonio

Un demonio que me mira
un demonio que me quiere
su calor se me sube a la piel
¡Demonios! ¿qué quiere de mí?
me quiere comer
me quiere beber
sorberme la sangre
encendiarme por completo
¿convertirme en ceniza?
un demonio que se juega al serio
un demonio con mirada dura
con mirada de acero
con mirada afilada
con mirada de fuego
que escupe escarlatas
astillas de vidrio envenenadas
en fin, un demonio
un demonio, un demonio
anaranjado, picudo,
voludo, cuadrado
en realidad, ¡le falta mucho
para ser un verdadero pícaro!
¡la pícara tendré que ser yo!

"Un demonio"

Un beso

Un beso--
dentro de su código velado
reside una historia
de inicio sustento
amor pérdida y deseo
un poema
un sueño
un tapiz
bordado de sílabas
de presión textura rítmo humedad
que revelan nuestro origen agua
un lenguaje del alma
alma que se acerca se retira
que se esconde y se revela
busca y quiere que se le busquen
baile de la matriz
sin pensamientos
de un sonido lento
sin palabras
primer idioma
de la lengua
que va en busca del mundo

A Kiss

A kiss--
within its shrouded code
resides a history
of birth nourishment
love loss and desire
a poem
a dream
a tapestry
woven of syllables
of pressure texture rhythm moisture
revealing our water origin
a language of the soul
soul approaching retreating
that hides reveals
seeks and wants to be sought
dance from the womb
of no thought
of slow sound
no word
first language
of the tongue
seeking the world

Encíclico

(del griego ἐκκύκλιος, "egkyklios", que significa "envolver en círculo")

La cara verde de la noche

la cara verde de la noche
sopla a través de las estrellas
aúlla en la puerta como un lobo
aunque sea ella maestra del abrir y cerrar
pide monedas
aunque sea ella cambio y bendición infinita
pide perdón
aunque ella sea la reconciliación
y el bálsamo que sana heridas
la cara verde de la noche
sopla a través de las estrellas
deseosa eternamente
por lo que nunca perdió
bebe sedienta
aunque ella sea el rocío
y sigue deseándose
aunque su esencia permanece atenta
hasta en las más recónditas aulas del universo
a través de este acto de amor
la cara verde de la noche
vuela por la noche
se conoce
como la noche que sopla
a través de las estrellas
el verde que se convierte en verde

"Night Geometry" / "Geometría Nocturna"

the green face of night

the green face of night
blows through the stars
howls like a wolf at the door
though she a master of open and close
begs for coins
though she is a blessing beyond measure
asks for forgiveness
though she is healing salve
the green face of night
blows through the stars
longing eternally
for what she never lost
drinking deeply with thirst
though she is deep unguent moisture
keeps longing for herself
though her essence never left
through this act of love
the green face of night
meets herself
green night
blows through the green stars
green becomes green

by Lorena Lobita Wolfman © July 2009

I hide from love

I hide from love
hide from love's hands
kisses
and salty skin
I hide from love
under the rain
under the sun
under the moon
I hide from love
like wind
like water
like a horse
that runs free
I hide from love
behind a smile
behind a word
behind a shadow
I hide from love
and yet
I am that
and I find myself
at every turn
in every word
with each step
I am that
and I find myself
in the hummingbird
in the whale
and in the fire
I am that
and I find myself
in the heart of the world
in the eye of God
in the eternal mother
I am that
and I find myself
I find myself
I find myself.

Me escondo del amor

Me escondo del amor
de su mano
de sus besos
de su piel salada
me escondo del amor
bajo la lluvia
bajo el sol
bajo la luna
me escondo del amor
como el viento
como el agua
como el caballo
que se van
me escondo de amor
detrás de una sonrisa
detrás de una palabra
detrás de una sombra
me escondo del amor
y sin embargo
soy yo
y me encuentro
en cada esquina
en cada verbo
en cada paso
soy yo
y me encuentro
en el colibrí
en la ballena
y en el fuego
soy yo
y me encuentro
en el corazón del mundo
en el ojo de Dios
en la madre eterna
soy yo
y me encuentro
me encuentro
me encuentro.

Al filo de los finos huesos

nosotras las verdades desnudas nosotras
las contamos con nuestras caras
mujeres más allá de los cuarenta
belleza conducida al descubierto
al filo los finos huesos
líneas desdibujadas ángulos suavizados
la piel que se ha usado debajo de una escarlata anaranjada
de muchos soles amanecidos y puestos
la filigrana de hueso de muchas
lunas crecientes y menguantes muchas lunas
nos hacemos transparentes debajo
de la presión cúbica cuadrada de la vida
nosotras habitantes de lo hondo
nosotras hermanas de Kali Kali nosotras
contamos historias de sangre corazón médula y polvo
hemos acumulado falanges falanges
para el collar de los que se han desvanecido
en el omnipresente río invisible de seres
aquí en este aire que respiramos
y hemos sido besadas por sus aguas
nosotras reposadas momentáneamente
sobre las piedras empapadas de sol
miramos largamente hacía la densidad inmesurable
en primavera del membrillo en flor
escuchamos el canto canto canto del cinzontle
el conocimiento implícito denso sobrecogedor
esta comprensión que se irrumpe
se irrumpe por nuestros poros
10,000 mariposas húmedas recién nacidas
posadas para subir al viento
un espectro precioso de la realidad mortal que amanece
que muchos no aguantan mirar
mirar esta tierna belleza terrible
no aguantan ver la verdad del todo
nosotras las mujeres más allá de los cuarenta
belleza llevada al descubierto
hasta el filo fino de los finos huesos

La exquisita lluvia

Cuando me tocas, una llovizna exquisita
empieza a caer,
despacio al principio
cuando me acaricias el cabello,
y trazas la línea
de mi espina dorsal
las orillas aladas, la cresta iliaca, de mi pelvis.
Sus alas, tan sensitivas como orejas de elefante
que sienten el ritmo que surge de la tierra
desde el otro lado del mundo,
el galopante ritmo de antílopes.
Tú lo escuchas también y persigues el mismo pulso.
Poco a poco la lluvia aumenta
hasta convertirse en un torrente furibundo
deslavando todo en su camino
tú, yo, las paredes, las sábanas, la cama,
hasta que no queda mas que el trueno
que resuena, grave gemido,
que sube y baja como la marea
en el océano de mi garganta.
Flotamos por horas
en las blancas aguas retumbantes
que a veces estallan,
a veces se retozan,
a veces se sosiegan,
y la exquisita lluvia
sigue cayendo, cayendo, cayendo,
a la tierra fecunda.

Despacio

Lame lento los dedos delgados de la tristeza,
mordisquea despacio la tierna oreja del sufrimiento,
más despacio aún sorbe los labios trémulos de la contradicción,
y de lo más lento absorbe la mirada húmeda de la paradoja.
Respira el delicado aroma tempestuoso
de este instante con una tranquilidad completa.
Equilíbrate en la lengua violenta de la noche y de los sueños
--sueños, de los que te acuerdas a medias y que nunca se lograron.
Muerde profundo la piel de lo agrio para encontrar lo dulce.
Álzalos temblorosos sol y luna para que te alumbren la vista,
abraza al nadir diurno tenebroso tanto como al nadir nocturno que arde.
Mientras la Tierra sigue dando vueltas tambaleante en su eje,
mientras la perfección camuflada por alguna lejana constelación pálida
de medianoche, esconde su cara,
tienes sólo tus propios ojos para ver.
No te apartes. Mira. Mira bien.

The Revolutionary Theatre of the Divine Imagination

The Revolutionary Theatre of the Divine Imagination (RTDI) is a marvellous and mysterious work. Part museum, part theater, part installation, part performance piece, part cathedral, it is a living philosophic testament and ever-changing kaleidoscopic experience. It is currently, and possibly for a limited time, housed in the Old Louisville apartment of its creator Gregory Chaney. To enter the installation, you must walk through a charming Victorian residential court, step down to the entrance, into small dim first floor and then slowly climb a narrow spiral stairway up to a hexagonal perch that feels something like a magical bird's nest full of salvaged transformed objects. During the day with the shutters pulled back it is bright, at night the ambience is set by light emanating from various sources: the aboriginal child bomb aka the diamond crystal radio telescope, a pinhole sieve, or "ego sieve", that projects diamond starlight, the open mind of the cosmic poet which resembles more than anything, a surreal antique phonograph cabinet, and various lamps ensconced in the space pouring forth an ambiance of mystery, at the center of which, reclining in dream, is the poet.

Once you enter the "theatre", you are not a passive viewer in the sense we are used to in the West when we view artwork. You have entered into a sanctum, into an experience, into a dream, and have become a participant by the mere act of your presence. And as a participant, the space begins its oniric work. It is full of rich multilayered metaphoric elements of all sorts-- the green hand, the luna moth, veins and arteries-- in fact, in this space everything becomes a metaphor with multiple meanings. And the presence of the black madonna abounds, a symbolic return to the integrative indigenous human values, a shift away from patriarchal splitting. The subject is the aesthetic history of what we know of consciousness itself, and thus the installation works on a mysterious meta-level on us as participant at that delicate nexus between our cultural and human mythologies and consciousness itself.

As a photographer of the "divine" work, I too became a living metaphoric participant of the work, as my photographs will be as they enter the world. It is at once prismatic, refractory, mirrored like a hall of mirrors might be at a carnaval, yet so much more sophistocated.

The experience of the installation along with its creator as guide (or perhaps he would prefer a term closer to describing channel or servant of the muse) Gregory Chaney, is in itself a process ever-birthing dynamic meaning as it is discovered and rediscovered. This might possibly be said of any great art, yet this work highlights this phenomena and the phenomena of making meaning which at its very base is dynamic becomes a central living subject of the art itself.

The Theatre of the Divine Imagination begins to weave its metaphoric effect on your imagination as you encounter the work on various levels; the sound of the human voice, african tribal music, endless symbolic juxtapositions and combinations, the artist, musicians, dancers, poets are all here in spirit. The work is woven in the language of dreams, of the subconscious, and even if conscious connections are not drawn immediately, they are there working. This is compounded by the fact that consciousness both acts as a mediator of and is the subject of the work and it becomes an creative co-creator of the experience. It is a place to dream, to connect what might normally be unconnectable in the realm of Cartesian logic. How we define perception through story, metaphor and myth is mirrored by the space, a hall of mirrors for consciousness, the effect is prismatic.

The work changes dynamically with factors like time of day and what the participant/observer brings at that moment and also what the guide, who in a sense becomes a kind of ancient Oracle, is inspired to highlight. It will be different for each person, and each visit will be different; and it is possible that the space will not open its secrets to all visitors.

These principals of subjectivity are at work in each of our lives all the time, moment to moment, part of the subjective nature of our perception, but this phenomena seems amplified and spotlighted by this space so that it comments on the phenomena and makes it more transparent, thus more conscious, and a subject for endless play and commentary; at the same time it remains mysterious as all great truths are, because their depth and multidimensional nature takes the mind beyond its reductionistic reifying tendencies.

The room itself is symbolically alive, as represented with the red and blue yarn that links the vital "organs" of the room together. Suggesting a circulatory system of mutual influences. Also connoting the animistic nature of the universe, a universe in which we are living participants, not superior to or apart from. We are introduced to the green hands of the green self, the indigenous, aboriginal self. As the installation experience comes into being through the relationship and perception of its participants, the work's existence is alive. This dissolves the museum paradigm for viewing art passively as a stranger to it as well as the prosenium arch audience-actor play-life dichotomy of theater-- and thus it is "revolutionary".

Spontaneously, my mind leapt to the Kivas of the Southwest and to the photographs of the world class mural work of Pottery Mound which I saw recently while I was visiting friends in Santa Fe. The Kivas are sacred ceremonial spaces of worship of cylindrical form dug into the earth, ritual participants sit around the edges looking into the center. The circular walls are often adorned with murals. In the case of pottery mound, there were an extraordinary number of Kivas and with some of the most outstanding artwork ever found in Southwest murals. I fell in love with the work. The forms, subjects, colors the very dimensions were refined to a high level connoting a spiritual culture that was extremely developed.

The Kiva is a space of collective worship, of spiritual renewal and fecundity; the people who celebrated their rites there were surrounded by their mythology, their keys to meaning. In RTDI Gregory has assembled keys of meaning to the Western experience where spirituality and art at some point got separated, sometimes the art taking the more soulful aspects of something that was once one, in the process of secularization, philosophy and the arts took on in many cases roles of making meaning, personal and collective. Here we have a space where we can explore and experience the meaning making process go back to its core, just as the Kiva is symbolically close to the core of the earth, it is in the Earth, part of the Earth, our context that gives us meaning. Here inside the RTDI we are inside the fertile soil of our collective artistic, philosophic, even scientific, meaning making process.

There is a sense of collectivity, all of the arts and sciences mutually influencing one another, great minds and artists are brought together to converse in new ways, Neruda, Kahlo, Merton, Edison, Tesla... And the question is raised, since this room does not deny or reject science, but includes it on the same plane and even recognizes it as an art, then, if our current inventions and current dominant socioeconomic structures (which appear to be failing our humanity so miserably) are the result of the Western mind which has created with certain premises, for example "man" is separate from "nature", what happens if those premises in which we are embedded, and therefore are normally invisible, are questioned, and we are therefore given the creative opportunity to change them? What will we invent then? How will we relate to ourselves, each other, the Earth, the Cosmos? With a premise of ourselves as interconnected with all nature, as creative inhabitants and participants in the chorus of existence. Other choices are possible, I have heard it said, for instance, that the aboriginees make a conscious creative choice, chose not to own/have and not to invent objects of "progress". What is science where subject-object duality is dropped? Perhaps this is the secret domain of genius. The statements of many brilliant minds certainly seem to throw light in this direction.

As found with great art, metalevels of meaning resound throughout the experience and reflection on its meaning. The fact however, that you physicially enter the space a ritual sacred space where art, spirit and consciousness meet, makes it very special. This brings us into an "aboriginal", as Gregory put it, relationship and awareness. Here our whole vehicle, the physical, sensory somatic vehicle of our embodied selves, something, we all share in this incarnate dimension, is activated, engaged. Exciting vertices of inquiry, and I would suggest embodied inquiry being the most fertile, are stimulated. For example: what is the relationship between body dream reality consciousness?; How can we create artful, ritual, spiritual spaces for living, dreaming, working, sharing collective visions?; What are the benefits/effects on and to our consciousness of such spaces? Though to frame this last question in terms of benefits seems ominously close to a western utilitarian and "profit-based" bias, as is the elusive, or shall I say, delusive, Western concept of "progress". Nonetheless, perhaps there is still some validity to the question if approached with care. What is certain is that allowing yourself to be moved by the experience of The Theatre of the Divine Imagination is fascinating. It is a one of a kind gem.

(Gregory Chaney is looking for a permanent home for this installation, where he can also serve as docent, guide, oracle. Please contact him at gregoryschaney@gmail.com if you have leads to such a place.)

Rosa sin tapujos

Exquisite Rain

When you touch me
a light exquisite rain begins to fall
slowly at first
as you stroke my hair
trace the contour of my vertebral spine
the winged edges, the iliac crest, of my pelvis.
Its alas, as sensitive as elephant ears,
hear the rhythm of galloping antelope
a world away rising from the ground.
You hear it too and move to the same rhythm.
Gradually the rainfall increases
until it becomes a raging torrent
washing everything in its path away,
you, me, the walls, the sheets, the bed
until all that is left is the thunder
echoing in a low moan
that rises and falls like the tides
from the ocean of my throat.
We float for hours
in the white rumbling waters
sometimes crashing,
sometimes tumbling,
sometimes still,
and the exquisite rain
keeps falling, falling, falling,
to the verdent earth.

The pulse of a thousand blue-winged butterflies

The taste of mist floats silent
all around, plush
as a cashmere ocean.
Peace and comfort spreads
like a mantle over the road ahead.
The windshield wiper blade
pushes aside the damp scent of rain
like an idle hand waving away
an unreconciled sweetness
as gentle solitude alights again and again
like the pulse of a thousand blue-winged butterflies
drawn to the singular blossom of home.


© 2004, 2009 Lorena Lobita Wolfman

Alumbramiento en los Rockies

"Of Light and Shadow"

Slow

Lick slow the slender fingers of sadness,
nibble suffering's tender ear even slower,
sip contradiction's trembling lips slower yet,
absorb paradox's moist eyes slowest of all,
inhale the delicate raging aroma
of this instant in complete stillness,
balance on the thrashing tongue of night and dreams
--dreams, the half remembered kind, that never came to be--
bite deep into the skin of bitterness to find sweetness,
raise up the shuttering moon and sun by which to see,
embrace both tenebrious diurnal and blazing nocturnal nadirs.
As Earth continues to wobble on its axis,
as perfection, camouflaged in some distant pale
midnight constellation, hides its face,
you have only your own eyes with which to see.
Linger. Look. Look with care.