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.