Jars of Springwater

Jars of springwater are not enough anymore.

Take us down to the river.

The face of peace, the sun itself.

No more the slippery, cloudlike moon.

Give us one clear morning after another,

and the one whose work remains unfinished,

who is our work as we diminish,

idle, though occupied, empty, and open.

A General Introductory Lecture

A nightingale flies nearer the roses.

A girl blushes. Pomegranates ripen.

Hallaj will be executed.

A man walks a mountain path, solitary

and full of prayer.

Narcissus at the edge, creekwater washing

tree roots. God is giving

a general introductory lecture.

We hear and read it everywhere,

in the field, through the branches.

We will never finish studying.

Neither of us has a penny,

yet we are walking the jeweler's bazaar

seriously considering making a purchase.

Or shall I say this with other metaphors?

A barn crowded with souls.

Quietness served around a table.

Two people talk along a road

that's paved with words.

The Sweet Taste of Grief

I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow

and called out, 

It tastes sweet, does it not?

You have caught me, grief answered,

and you have ruined my business.

How can I sell sorrow, 

when you know it's a blessing?

Awkward Comparisons

This physical world has no two things alike.

Every comparison is awkwardly rough.

You can put a lion next to a man,

but the placing is hazardous to both.

Say the body is like this lamp.

It has to have a wick and oil, sleep and food.

If it doesn't get those, it will die,

and it is always burning those up, trying to die.

But where is the sun in this comparison?

It rises, and the lamp's light

mixes with the day.

Oneness, which is the true reality,

cannot be understood with lamp and sun images,

and the blurring of a plural into a unity is wrong.

No image can describe

what of our fathers and mothers,

our grandfathers and grandmothers, remains.

Language does not touch

the one who lives in both of us.

Smoke

Don't listen to anything I say.

I must enter the center of the fire.

Fire is my child, but I must be consumed

and become fire.

Why is there crackling and smoke?

Because the firewood and the flames

are talking to each other.

You are too dense. Go away.

You are too wavering.

I have solid form.

In the darkness those friends keep arguing.

Like a wanderer with no face.

Like the most powerful bird in existence

sitting on its perch, refusing to move.

Mary's Hiding

Before these possessions you love

slip away, say what Mary said

when she was surprised by Gabriel.

I'll hide inside God.

Naked in her room

she saw a form of beauty

that could give her new life.

Like the sun coming up,

or a rose as it opens,

she leaped, as her habit was,

out of herself into the presence.

There was fire in the channel of her breath.

Light and majesty came.

I am smoke from that fire

and proof of its existence,

more than any external form.

Only Breath (2)

Friends, when I taste love's wine,

the two worlds combine,

and I have no purpose

but this play of presences.

If I spend one moment outside you,

I repent, and when I have

a moment of closer rapport,

I dance to rubble the ruins

of both. Shams Tabriz,

this friendship is all I say.