26/3/15
Some of us learn how to speak another language.
Others excel in the sciences, mathematics, dance, and poetry.
We are practice-rs beginning, growing through trial and error.
or we progress, become
proficient, fluent and yet still learning
while some, the fewer of us, the dedicated,
the bloody and sweaty,
the diligent, determined,
the stubborn and pretentious
are often known as masters.
Mastery elicits both the dominant and docile.
It is the tangible, concrete like books and stones.
It rings of sleepless years,
a life beyond the 9 to 5 standard.
It channels the legendary,
the respected and feared-
the charismatic and crazy.
I could try and write a list:
the masters of politics, of sports, of courtrooms and art-
but instead
I’ve been humbled
today, on the sidewalk corner between Hermano Miguel
and the braided haired Chola with gold beads and a feathered hat
selling shining pebbles of capulí berries from her wheelbarrow.
There he was.
The master who sat,
Enjoying the remnants of his wooden stick’s ice cream,
bent over in the warmth of the morning’s coconut clouds.
I passed as if I had just entered his kitchen of pavement,
walking quickly so as not to disturb his intimate solitude and sweet meal.
Or was I nervous?
This man was no ordinary master.
His legs, the size of two doll arms, were crossed
beneath his body 4-5 times their size,
limp and deathly still-
as if the weight of his head and heart had rendered them lifeless.
Some of us dedicate our lives to books, to music, to the stage,
or the farms outside city streets-
learning to create, build, publish, fight, and fix…
which is all to say:
mastery exists in many doorsteps,
it lives within countless hungry souls,
and it lies within blended colors of paints and jammed file cabinets…
But today I was struck,
silently, but surely still-
a tiny gasp escaping my busied respiratory chamber
bowed so deeply
at the presence of the man and his ice-cream,
with two tiny legs, tucked
beneath his aged, grown torso
and hidden, like a nest of humming bird eggs behind a long hanging jungle leaf-
motionless, but so regal, like the footstool of a king.
His pensive presence,
a testimony to his holy spirit and limitless light aflame,
in this crippled master’s coursing veins
as if to say to the world of the waking
this is not the end.
There, in his hunched sugar coned satisfaction of Thursday morning
lives a master:
A master of ice cream and the sidewalk.
A master of survival.