Preface by the Translator
§ Sloka One Sweet Talk in the Syrene Limb
Stanzas 1 – 7
1 So enter by the living dream the secret
2 Time, let’s suppose, flows and
3 Asuramaya lived a double life.
4 Assigned, not chosen.
5 Then is the moment when the Blue Prince
6 Suppose then that time does flow and,
7 The counsel of the Blue Prince
§ Sloka Two Walking the Alameda
Stanzas
8 - 11
8 The day we were all shot with neutrinos
9 Asuramaya sighed.
10 If silence be the ground of seeing let the light
11 “But the dharma is entirely impersonal - ”
§ Sloka Three Aengus and Etain
Stanzas 12 - 24
12 "What a sorry world" Asuramaya mused
13 Asuramaya was encouraged to look again
14 Once a loner left adrift in mythtide
15 "The rime cannot be translated, alas"
16 Broken though it is, all that he loved
17 "The Lord of Andromeda is a mosaic gel"
18 Listening, listening
19 One spoke once of Aengus and Etain
20 Once a time in Erin saw a loner leaving home
21 Once a loner left alone in mythtime
22 When Alizan laid down a life in Flanders
23 "The legend has been dated,
24 And sure but slender are the dead fingers
§ Sloka Four Prodigal Heart
Stanzas 25 - 41
25 "You were there before then
26 Who, if you screamed bloody murder, would hear you
27 Somewhere south of Hyderabad the furnace starts
28 Friday morning. Rose and shaved,
29 [Passage in progress: dialogue on reincarnation]
30 Two months into the south wandering without aim
31 You spend the child’s gaze in distant places
32 Languid and warped out of time
33 Madras, where the sun wounds the sand
34 One prodigal heart to staunch all human pain
35 Then North to Patna in a lightning storm
36 So damn them all and damn the blood that sears your veins
37 Now behold a porky pundit in saffron drag
38 [Passage in progress]
39 Love: a lotus blooming in the darkest loam of death
40 Mind at the end like a dazed bird
41 At far periphery of India time
§ Sloka Five The Physics of Beauty
Stanzas 42 - 52
42 Star-riddled roaming Child,
43 In deep green sky a fleece of yellow cloud
44 Star-riddled roaming Child
45 Child
46 The Andromedan Prince is generous to castaways
47 Star-riddled Child
48 "The Lord is a mosaic gel, and his Consort is a scarf"
49 And you Child, looking up from earth
50 "Be watchful Children" as the Blue Prince sings
51 [Passage in progress]
52 Where nightwind hastens dawn
Nature is not natural—it is the creation of gods, it is divine. Everything that is in the world shares that condition, everything shares the powers, the great spirits that rule existence from the air. It is the same with words. Whoever pronounces words puts power in motion. That is what the Ashaninka is forced to live in harmony with the powers of this world, of those worlds. The Ashaninka harmonizes with those powers in order to be able to hold within a single body both his material and spiritual bodies.
- Cesar Calvo, The Three Halves of Ino Moxo
