"LYRICS #3" by JOSE GARCIA VILLA

RENE J. NAVARRO Engages

"Lyrics #3" from the book Have Come, Am Here by Jose Garcia Villa
(Viking, New York, 1942)

I wrote this poem in 1985, after reading Jose Garcia Villa's "Lyrics #3."  I was doing at the time an esoteric Daoist meditation called Microcosmic Orbit/Small Heavenly Circle -- the human body is a microcosm of the universe -- moving the Qi in the trajectory of two ancestral meridian channels, up on Du Mai (back line) from the base at Hui Yin/perineum to the Bai Hui/crown and down on Ren Mai (front line) :

MEDITATION

-for Jose Garcia Villa

                                    Seize me and circle:

                                    Phoenix and Dragon together,

                                    Enter into my navel.  Enter.

                                    O what Joy stirs

                                    in my loins, deep,

                                    deeper. Into the bones

                                    hissing: O radium Light,

                                    descending. Into the

                                    Soul's meridians,

                                    burning. Diabolus

                                    of Pearl, ascending.

                                    It orbits the Heavens

                                    now, bright, brighter.

                                    It floats to Earth again:

                                    dark and still darker,

                                    here, there, pulsing.

                                    O Radiance, I'm falling.

                                    Ambushed, helpless, lost

                                    Between ecstacy and dying.

*****

Rene Navarro is a poet and teacher of Daoist healing arts, martial arts, acupuncture, internal alchemy, tai chi, among others. He has a website: http://www.renenavarro.org