Undressing

Learn the alchemy true human beings know.

The moment you accept what troubles

you've been given, the door will open.

Welcome difficulty, as a familiar comrade.

Joke with torment brought by the Friend.

Sorrows are the rags of old clothes

and jackets that serve to cover,

and then are taken off.

That undressing,

and the naked body underneath,

is the sweetness that comes after grief.

He Is a Letter

Someone who goes with half a loaf of bread

to a small place that fits like a nest around him,

someone who wants no more,

who is not himself longed for

by anyone else.

He is a letter to everyone. You open it.

It says, Live.

Judge a Moth by the Beauty of Its Candle

You are the king's son.

Why do you close yourself up?

Become a lover.

Don't aspire to be a general

or a minister of state.

One is a boredom for you,

the other a disgrace.

You have been a picture on a bathhouse wall

long enough. No one recognizes you here, do they?

God's lion disguised as a human being.

I saw that and put down the book

I was studying, Hariri's Maqamat.

There is no early and late for us.

The only way to measure a lover

is by the grandeur of the beloved.

Judge a moth by the beauty of its candle.

Shams is invisible because he is inside sight.

He is the intelligent essence

of what is everywhere at once, seeing.

The Lord of All the East

Strike, Andy Heatwole

Slave, be aware that the Lord

of all the East is here.

A flickering stormcloud

shows his lightnings to you.

Your words are guesswork.

He speaks from experience.

There is a huge difference.

I Am Not

I am not the centuries-ago Muhammed.

I listen inside this day

like a fresh-fired Phoenix,

not some pigeon looking for seed.

There is a king for whom other kings

are stable boys. Some sip Hallaj's wine.

I drink his truth by the jar, by the barrel.

Qibla for the soul, kaaba for the heart.

I am the constant sky,

not a Friday mosque's ceiling dome.

Clean mirror, no rust.

I am the burning core of Mount Sinai,

not a mind full of hatred.

I taste a wine not pressed from grapes.

The one everyone calls to

when they are in sudden mortal danger,

I am That.

Gabriel could sit here beside me,

if he became God.

The King's Lead-Camel

There is a boy watching a cornfield,

keeping birds away by beating a small drum.

A king with a huge army camps nearby.

He has a tall and powerful camel

that carries big kettle drums and a drummer

at the front of his columns

constantly throbbing out courage

and determination.

That particular camel wanders

into the boy's cornfield.

The boy runs toward it

beating his toy tom-tom to scare it away.

A wise man advises, Don't bother, my son.

That camel is used to drumsound.

He will not scare.

So a lover completely given to the beloved

has no fear of death and no need of showing off.

It is with me as with the boy,

who stops beating his fear-drum

to watch and follow quietly

behind the king's lead camel

meandering through the corn.

What I See in Your Eyes

Out of myself, but wanting to go beyond that

wanting what I see in your eyes,

not power, but to kiss the ground

with the dawn breeze for company,

wearing white pilgrim cloth.

I have a certain knowing.

Now I want sight.

Out in Empty Sky

If you catch a fragrance of the unseen,

like that, you will not be able

to be contained.

You will be out in empty sky.

Any beauty the world has, any desire,

will easily be yours.

As you live deeper in the heart,

the mirror gets clearer and cleaner.

Shams of Trabriz realized God in himself.

When that happens,

you have no anxieties about losing anyone

or anything. You break the spells

that human difficulties cause.

Interpretations come, hundreds,

from all the religious symbols

and parables and prayers.

You know what they mean,

when the presence lives through you.

Silkworms

 

Silkworm Moth - Bombyx mori - Just Hatched 

Anna Theodora at flickr, used with permission

The hurt you embrace

becomes joy.

Call it to your arms

where it can change.

A silkworm eating leaves

makes a cocoon.

Each of us weaves a chamber

of leaves and sticks.

Silkworms begin to truly exist

as they disappear inside that room.

Without legs, we fly.

When I stop speaking,

this poem will close, 

and open its silent wings . . .

Underwater in the Fountain

Susanna Sitting by the Fountain
Crispijn van de Passe I, Dutch, 1564 - 1637
Philadelphia Museum of Art

When you die into the soul,

you lift the lid on the cooking pot.

You see the truth

of what you have been doing.

It looks terrible and sad

before the crossover move

that lets nine levels of ascension

turn into ordinary ground.

Into silence, a conversation with Khidr,

as there you are blind and deaf,

underwater in the fountain.

Consider What Choices

Jackson Pollock, unknown title; I call it "Paw"

You wreck my shop and my house

and now my heart, but how can I run

from what gives me life?

I am weary of personal worrying,

in love with the art of madness.

Tear open my shame and show the mystery.

How much longer do I have to fret

with self-restraint and fear?

Friend, this is how it is.

We are fringe sewn inside

the lining of a robe.

Soon we will be loosened,

the binding threads torn out.

The beloved is a lion.

We are the lame deer in his paws.

Consider what choices we have.

No Flag

I used to want buyers for my words.

Now I wish someone would buy me away from words.

I have made a lot of charmingly profound images,

scenes with Abraham and Abraham's father, Azar,

who was famous for making icons.

I am so tired of what I have been doing.

Then one image without form came,

and I quit.

Look for someone else to tend the shop.

I am out of the image-making business.

Finally I know the freedom

of madness.

A random image arrives. I scream,

Get out! It disintegrates.

Only love.

Only the holder the flag fits into.

No flag.

Looking for the Center

The Friend comes into my body

looking for the center, unable

to find it, draws a blade,

strikes anywhere.

The Knots Untie (2)

We have tried the fullness of presence.

Now it's time for desolation.

Love is pulling us out by the ears to school.

Love wants us clean of resentment

and those impulses that misguide our souls.

We are asleep, but Khidr

keeps sprinkling water on our faces.

Love will tell us the rest of what

we need to know soon.

Then we'll be deeply asleep and profoundly awake

simultaneously, like cave companions.

The Knots Untie (1)

Fire is whispering a secret in smoke's ear.

This aloeswood loves me

because I help it live out its purpose.

With me it becomes fragrance,

and then disappears altogether.

The knots untie and open into absence,

as you do with me, my friend.

Eaten by flame, and smoked out into the sky.

This is most fortunate.

What's unlucky is not to change and disappear.

This way leads through humiliation and contempt.

The Moments You Have Lived

An essence turns to ocean,

the particles glisten.

Watch how in this candleflame instant

blaze all the moments you have lived.

Medicine out of Pain

In this drumbeat moment of red flowers opening

and grapes being crushed,

the soul and luminous clarity sit together.

All desire wants is a taste of you,

two small villages in a mountain valley

where everyone longs for presence.

We start to step up.

A step appears.

You say, I am more compassionate

than your mother and father.

I make medicine out of your pain.

From your chimney smoke I shape new constellations.

I tell everything, but I do not say it,

because, my friend, it is better

your secret be spoken by you.

Autumn Rose Elegy

You have gone to the secret world.

Which way is it? You broke the cage and flew.

You heard the drum that calls you home.

You left this humiliating shelf, this disorienting

desert where we are given wrong directions.

What use now a crown?

You have become the sun.

No need for a belt.

You have slipped out of your waist.

I have heard that near the end

you were eyes looking at soul.

No looking now. You live inside the soul.

You are the strange autumn rose

that led the winter wind in by withering.

You are rain soaking everywere

from cloud to ground.

No bother of talking. Flowing silence

and sweet sleep beside the Friend.

I'm Not Saying This Right

You bind me, and I tear away in a rage to open out

into air, a round brightness, a candlepoint,

all reason, all love.

This confusing joy, your doing,

this hangover, your tender thorn.

You turn to look, I turn.

I'm not saying this right.

I am a jailed crazy who ties up spirit-women.

I am Solomon.

What goes come back. Come back.

We never left each other.

A disbeliever hides his disbelief,

but I will say his secret.

More and more awake, getting up at night,

spinning and falling with love for Shams.

What's Not Here

I start out on this road,

call it love or emptiness.

I only know what's not here.

Resentment seeds, backscratching greed,

worrying about outcome, fear of people.

When a bird gets free,

it does not go back for remnants

left on the bottom of the cage.

Close by, I'm rain. Far off,

a cloud of fire. I seem restless,

but I am deeply at ease.

Branches tremble. The roots are still.

I am a universe in a handful of dirt,

whole when totally demolished.

Talk about choices does not apply to me.

While intelligence considers options,

I am somewhere lost in the wind.

Love and I Talking

Ball at the Moulin de la Galette, by Auguste Renoir

Love says, You cannot deny me. Try.

I say, Yes, you appear out of nowhere

like the bubbles in wine, here and then not.

Love says, Prisoned in the body-jar,

singing at the banquet. I say, 

This ecstasy is dangerous.

Love says, I sip the delicious day,

until night takes the cup away.

Then I insist night give it back.

The light I see by never changes.

The water of realization is the wine we mean,

where love is the liquid and your body the flagon.

Grace floods in. The wine's power

breaks the jar. It is happening now.

The water of waking becomes the one who pours,

the wine itself, and every presence at the banquet.

No metaphor can hold this truth that knows how

to keep secret and when to show off.

In the Arc of Your Mallet

Le Pont De L'Europe, by Gustave Caillebotte

Don't go anywhere without me.

Let nothing happen in the sky apart from me,

or on the ground, in this world or that world,

without my being in its happening.

Vision, see nothing I don't see.

Language, say nothing.

The way the night knows itself with the moon,

be that with me. Be the rose

nearest to the thorn that I am.

I want to feel myself in you when you taste food,

in the arc of your mallet when you work,

when you visit friends, when you go

up on the roof by yourself at night.

There is nothing worse than to walk out along the street

without you. I don't know where I'm going.

You are the road and the knower of roads,

more than maps, more than love.

Your Eyes

"Senecio" by Paul Klee

I am so small I can barely be seen.

How can this great love be inside me?

Look at your eyes. They are so small,

but they see enormous things.

Walnuts

Blarney, Ireland

Philosophers have said that we love music

because it resembles the sphere-sounds of union.

We have been part of a harmony before,

so these moments of treble and bass

keep our remembering fresh.

Hearing the sound, we gather strength.

Love kindles with melody. Music feeds a lover

composure, and provides form for the imagination.

Music breathes on personal fire and makes it keener.

The waterhole is deep. A thirsty man climbs

a walnut tree growing next to the pool

and drops walnuts in one by one.

He listens carefully to the sound

as they hit and watches the bubbles.

A more rational man gives advice, You will regret

doing this. You are so far from the water

that by the time you get down to gather walnuts,

the water will have carried them away.

He replies, I am not here for walnuts.

I want the music they make when they hit.

Water From Your Spring

Drinking from the Holy River, Mitchell Kanashkevich

What was in that candle's light

that opened and consumed me so quickly?

Come back, my friend. The form of our love

is not a created form.

Nothing can help me but that beauty.

There was a dawn I remember

when my soul heard something from your soul.

I drank water from your spring

and felt the current take me.

Goldsmithing

Danae and the Shower of Gold, by Orazio Gentileschi

By Saladin's shop suddenly

I hear the music of gold

being hammered, gold and God.

As gold thins out,

the presence becomes a sheer

goldleaf light

on this goldbeater's face,

in his eyes as he works.

As the love-secret of Jacob

becomes Joseph's smile,

as lovers leave what keeps them confined,

as Job's patience dissolves to nothing,

you are the Friend

coming toward this touching.

You are the soul.

Be that, and when you hear yourself

in some hypocrisy,

cut free. Quickly, cut.

*This poem records the moment in Konya when Rumi heard an inner music in the goldbeater's hammering coming from his friend Saladin's shop. The legend is that he began spontaneously turning in the street in response to the music of existence.

Hoping to Be More Alive

You are an ocean in a drop of dew,

all the universes in a thin sack of blood.

What are these pleasures then,

these joys, these worlds

that you keep reaching for,

hoping they will make you more alive?

This Dove Here

Someone who does not run

toward the allure of love

walks a road where nothing lives.

But this dove here

senses the love-hawk floating above,

and waits, and will not be driven

or scared to safety.

Out Beyond

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, Language, even the phrase each other

doesn't make any sense.

No Room for Form (2)

And don't look for me in a human shape.

I am inside your looking. No room

for form with love this strong.

Beat the drum and let the poets speak.

This is a day of purification for those

who are already mature and initiated

into what love is.

No need to wait until we die.

There is more to want here than money

and being famous and bites of roasted meat.

Now, what shall we call this new sort of gazing-house

that has opened in our town where people sit

quietly and pour out their glancing

like light, like answering?

No Room for Form (1)

On the night when you cross the street

from your shop and your house to the cemetery,

you will hear me hailing you from inside

the open grave, and you will realize

how we have always been together.

I am the clear consciousness-core

of your being, the same in ecstasy

as in self-hating fatigue.

That night, when you escape the fear of snakebite

and all irritation with the ants,

you will hear my familiar voice,

see the candle being lit,

smell the incense, the surprise meal

fixed by the lover inside all your other lovers.

This heart-tumult is my signal

to you igniting in the tomb.

So don't fuss with the shroud

and the graveyard road dust.

Those get ripped open and washed away

in the music of our finally meeting.