from the books 'Portraits- Poetic Tributes.' (The Lorca poem has a Spanish version. The poem below is not a translation but another rendition, which will be published in the Los Angeles magazine Ventana Anierta.)

Juan Gris

'Poem With Still Life'

A circle/ A shadow- with a square
Shade
Outside of which light wants to get in;
Dance in
As if forbidden there in the rectangle
To laugh-
Mechanical pencil- makes itself
A door as to liberate guitar strings
Silent in the geometry of patterns
Wants to levitate with duende
Figuring a woman who is the spine
Of the la'ud
An arm traverses her hollow interior
of endless resonance
Plucking the center abbys
What's more higher lines
Vertical
Crossing the horizontal
Cylindrical wrist
The sound then gives birth
To flowers
Marching into the circle
Flamenco in paint-
Without moving it exudes:
Each thing talks that
Each that talks thing.
Made up of a gathering of silence
'Harlequin With A Guitar'
Bolero cubes
Like ice in brandy
Transparent
Dimensional lament with joy
The third dimension of desire-
The shape of a door opens
Bluest sky.
In this realm
If you didn't go to church-
Just kneel
In front of:
'Seated Harlequin'
A pantomime captured
With spoken lines
The joke of life
Things just visible enough
To bring them back
From a dream.

Kobayashi Issa

His eyes were binoculars
small things
Had the fury of the cosmos.
A winter enters a molar
a mosquito drinks up the ocean,
Tiny particles- a fly's leg
hits the leaf like thunder
The very moon a cherry
in a beggars pocket
And if it down pours rain
horses all wet upon 'chrysanthemum'
Who have no knowledge
of fragrance emanating
From the strokes of a brush-
her kimono full of fruit
Five fingers in her womb.
His father's best crop: Issa
of the renga chain mountains
Of Yataro-
must be a place
Sounds in which gongs
I'll compose it through
his photos
Watch the light in the river
plum trees covered with snow,
A jade Buddha in a garden
toned in the frosty optics
of an owl through which
a moth crosses out of nowhere
Towards the porcelain light
of a cats teeth
Which pierced through
the morning fog.
Issa heard insects with sour
throats.
In case of the flies
he always swung with pad.
Bed bugs ran out of the sky
the bed of the stars
Covered by the blanket
of the blue firmament.
He saw facial features scatter
in the sunrise
Noses and eyes charge
up trees insert themselves
In random animation,
and then look back
How ridiculous everything is
scarecrows eating rice
Dogs asleep upon melons
The rich try to buy
the poetry they do not have
Snow turns to shit
they frame it as art.
Quiet...Issa has reincarnated
lives in Detroit
Passes by Barrio
polished Mexican house
Through window
sees kids hit piñata
Looks like flower
coming apart
With las mañanitas
all is flor y canto
The horizon smiles with Issa
everything else
Becomes stupid.

Vigo Martin

In a city that now floats
in a bottle
In a dimension outside the census
walls which were outside the archives,
There was a painter
Whose roll was to paint the pyramids
As in Palanque
or the chambers of the Egyptian
Pyramids
Vigo painted the inside
hallways of the tenements
While throughout the air
he flew upon a white horse
or smoked hash-hish
out of Moroccan tubes.
He painted rocks as
if they were pottery.
Loose bricks were
found by landlords
Containing anthillian
pictographs.
An artisan of the streets
whose smooth knowledge
From many angles
made more lines visible
Through the old face of the barrio.
Against colorful bodega windows
bright candy stores
Or deep in the clubs of night
under the world
In the sub-metropolis of need,
once we spoke of lizard instincts
Of frozen eye sockets
containing marbles,
In the chance of numbers
till dawn brought
A kind of light blue
to the roofs and bricks
And the edges, became visible.
Vigo made a collaboration
between survival and creativity,
He stored objects that came
in the wind
Like a bazaar in search
of a dictionary of shapes
And texture.
As evidence that I was there
on this planet
I still maintain a rock
which he painted against
The laws of gravity-
Now grounding the poetry
of the tropics
Against the East Trade Winds.
In a conference of the stoops
He maintained his Mayaguez
Sweet Lips origin-
So I'll go there and
touch a tree,
In honor of his Taino hands,
upon one of which
A cherry blossomed.

Muhyi-din Ibn 'Arabi

Born in Muricia-Spain not far from the sea,
salt in the wind always good for colors,
Milage of star sky must've
come down to become almonds,
Frankincense like something you could touch,
permission of a fragrance-
Where respiration- a mountain
is born taller in a land of many.
Patches of inner silver hidden,
in the halalujah of the substratum,
Shine from the interior of the earth.
Avicena hovered as an Angel,
corridors of moist sound,
Voices in a spider web of Talking Things,
like a pink of silence filling a dress,
The moon divided into shoes,
Sublime of the skies,
where they say a turquoise ice floats,
Night to observe when
what blew into Breath-
Eyes fresh from the Zodiacal Towers
as all impossibility grew knees,
Merely to prostrate,
such visibility from the Bay of Cartagena,
Where chocolate from America melted,
parrots escaped from the cages
They crossed the Atlantic in,
by then Ibn Arabi was imagination,
A perception that not all the time
the letters find you awake-
Not everyone will here the same
heard a turban unroll and say,
if the syntax confuses the novice,
I am disguised as bone
to regain my throne,
The taste of nuggets
Cream of walnut
the study of Cafe
The heart open itself
to the thoughts of Venus,
Sees from a distance,
A flower destined for your breasts,
before the earth became adobes,
Adam wrapped as a quill-
through the sundance dawn of the
Compass antennas of the palms.
Hash-hish in Marrakesh,
in Cairo bellies that turned to tea,
Alexandria of scrolls,
dreams over Fez,
Azuleas of verse.
In Mecca he found a Harmonica,
a sound sighted by the opticals
Of the solar divine
into the beauty of earth,
Which he play to produce the air,
in creation of her acietuna flesh,
Who it was itself
to know it.
Circulating the black stone
orbits the white night.
The concord grapes below her eyebrows,
framed like paintings in the desert museum,
Visible from the bottom of a Jupiter crater.
Though the earth is contaminated
Ibn'Arabi saw a glimpse of another
world- know now here there before his eyes.
Wind of fire
Trapped in flames
spaces all the places
Fusus al-hakam.
A gardenia of iron.
His origin
the beginning of passage
1621
In Murcia there were woman
who would not. let me sleep
In peace-
In the fermentation
Gyrations
I would walk the ripples
created by an ankle dipped
In a lake Expanding into the 28 mansions
of the moon
The savanna of the skies
traveling through perfume,
To distinguish them all
as prayer.
At the same time
someone might have seen
Naked Greek statues in motion
across the Amazon,
Not marble but arboreal bronze.
Today conjure Ibn 'Arabi
to Miami
Where dancers circular Rueda
encloses the forms of the World.

Federico Garcia Lorca

In Europe there are streets of stone
where leather has become sound-
Vanishing-audible
in the Peninsular which exits
Into Africa

Iberian doors
opening-closing Archways
Shaped in guitars Visigoth
kitsch colored stones.
The same street has been
another tongue
Which licks another epoch,
preserves the flavor of an accent
The roots of our hair-
wooden boats upon the waves
Of our blackness, Shadows
upon the fountains of poetic
Tiles of flowers

In the echoes
of the al-Hambra
A structure/a book of verse
each room a young wife,
Precious you are air
embracing the plastic
Coconut palms whispering
to the crescent moon
Wrapped in the singing
of a rooster all crawling
Towards the Sierra Nevada
like a matador towards
His love the bull, as the water streams
Down to the house of Allah.
India in the black flamenco
pants dance the Sanskrit
Whistle flute windows
of Albaicin rum
Your presence under the
towers of the Mosque
Laura- Fernando
Salsa spins under the moon
stabbed by a cross
As we dance with your blood
our pierced Guarani imagines
Naked islands-
Lorca in Cuba of Rhumba,
we are all gypsies of contraband
Finally America- an error in phonetics,
longs for its lost China
Its lovely India Orquidia
(transfer from Granada to Manati-
I saw Lorca there-holding the Sirens
hands- her Boricua waist- her sunset
of alphabets)
In the childhood of his theater
Andalucia was a stage,
he was a page
For the proverbs of his Nanas hands
listen there are songs
Which put us to sleep,
we hear them again in Harlem
The deep song of 125th street
its blue desert towards
The water of screaming curves,
crown for the king of Granada,
Crown for the king of Harlem,
your womb of children,
Giving birth in Fuentevaqueros.
Terror and gentleness
Scream and kiss
Fire and roses.
A farmer of color crops,
Borges baptized him a painter
drawing with his words
Lines-circles, a nation.
An old man stares in
a baby's glance,
Antiquity of old stone,
he made cities of the occult
So visible now
we walk within them
We dance within them,
and through them the
birds fly.
We burn within them our flesh,
he left plazas of desire
For our fertile eyes,
balconies for our drama.
The water and the fire,
the women and the men,
The pants and the skirt,
and the road that leads
To the river illuminated.