Someone Digging in the Ground

May Picture, by Paul Klee

An eye is meant to see things.

The soul is here for its own joy.

A head has one use: for loving a true love.

Legs: to run after.

Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind,

for learning what men have done and tried to do.

Mysteries are not to be solved. The eye goes blind

when it only wants to see why.

A lover is always accused of something.

But when he finds his love, whatever was lost

in the looking comes back completely changed.

On the way to Mecca, many dangers: thieves,

the blowing sand, only camel's milk to drink.

Still, each pilgrim kisses the black stone there

with pure longing, feeling in the surface

the taste of the lips he wants.

This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up,

while the real work is being done outside

by someone digging in the ground.

The Freshness

When it's cold and raining,

you are more beautiful.

And the snow brings me

even closer to your lips.

The inner secret, that which was never born,

you are that freshness, and I am with you now.

I can't explain the goings,

or the comings. You enter suddenly,

and I am nowhere again.

Inside the majesty.

Lightning

Lovers Walking in the Snow (Crow and Heron)

Suzuki Harunobu (Japanese, 1725–1770)

This is no ordinary friendship.

I attend your banquet as wine attends.

Like lightning, I am an expert at dying.

Like lightning, this beauty has no language.

It makes no difference

whether I win or lose.

You sit with us in a congregation of the dead,

where one handful of dirt says,

I was once a head of hair.

Another, I was a backbone.

You say nothing.

Love comes in, I can deliver you

from yourself in this moment.

Now lover and beloved grow quiet.

My mouth is burning with sweetness.

As Much as a Pen Knows

Do you think that I know what I'm doing?

That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?

As much as a pen knows what it's writing,

or the ball can guess where it's going next.

Two Kinds of Intelligence

There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,

as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts

from books and from what the teacher says,

collecting information from the traditional sciences

as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.

You get ranked ahead or behind others

in regard to your competence in retaining

information. You stroll with this intelligence

in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always

more marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet, one

already completed and preserved inside you.

A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness

in the center of the chest. This other intelligence

does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid,

and it does not move from outside to inside

through the conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead

from within you, moving out.

A Dumb Experiment

Break open your personal self

to taste the story of the nutmeat soul.

These voices come from that rattling

against the outer shell.

The nut and the oil inside

have voices that can only be heard

with another kind of listening.

If it weren't for the sweetness of the nut,

the inner talking, who would ever shake a walnut?

We listen to words

so we can silently

reach into the other.

Let the ear and mouth get quiet,

so this taste can come to the lip.

Too long we have been saying poetry,

talking discourses, explaining the mystery outloud.

Let us try a dumb experiment.

Uthman's Silence

The story is told of Uthman, who when he became caliph

mounted quickly the steps of Muhammad's pulpit,

where Abu Bakr, out of respect for the prophet,

seated himself on the second step.

There were three steps. Omar sat on the third step.

Uthman climbed to the top. When asked why, he replied,

If I sat on the third step, people would say

I was like Omar. If on the second step,

He's like Abu Bakr.

But up here where the chosen one sat, no one will think

to compare me with that king of the spirit.

And sometimes when he had climbed

to the preaching place, that sweet one Uthman,

would not say anything. He stayed silent

until midafternoon. No one asked him

for a sermon, and no one left the mosque.

In the silence many began to see with Uthman's light.

This is how a living master opens the inner eye.