A Great Rose Tree

This is the day and the year of the rose.

The whole garden is opening with laughter.

Iris whispering to cypress.

The rose is the joy of meeting someone.

The rose is a world imagination

cannot imagine, a messenger

from the orchard where the soul lives.

A small seed that points

to the great rose tree.

Hold its hand and walk like a child.

A rose is what grows from the work

the prophets do, full moon, new moon.

Accept the invitation spring extends,

four birds flying toward a master.

A rose is all these and the silence

that closes and sits in the shade, a bud.

The Bright Core of Failure

Sometimes you enter the heart.

Sometimes you are born from the soul.

Sometimes you weep a song of separation.

It is all the same glory.

You live in beautiful forms,

and you are the energy that breaks form.

All light, neither this nor that.

Human beings go places on foot.

Angels, with wings.

Even if they find nothing but ruins

and failure, you are the bright core of that.

An Invisible Bee

Look how desire has changed in you,

how light and colorless it is,

with the world growing new marvels

because of your changing.

Your soul has become an invisible bee.

We don't see it working,

but there's the full honeycomb.

Your body's height, six feet or so,

but your soul rises through nine levels of sky.

A barrel corked with earth

and a raw wooden spile

keeps the oldest vineyard's wine inside.

When I see you,

it is not so much your physical form,

but the company of two riders,

your pure-fire devotion and your love

for the one who teaches you.

Then the sun and moon on foot behind those.

The Self We Share

Look fish, you are already in the ocean.

Just swimming there makes you friends with glory.

What are these grudges about?

You are Benjamin.

Joseph has put a gold cup in your grain sack

and accused you of being a thief.

Now he draws you aside and says,

You are my brother. I am a prayer. You are the Amen.

We move in eternal regions,

yet we worry about property here.

Let this be the prayer of each:

You are the source of my life.

You bring rivers from the mountain springs.

You brighten my eyes.

The wine you offer takes me out of myself

into the self we share.

Doing that is religion.

The Miracle-Signs

Here are the miracle-signs you want,

that you cry through the night

and get up at dawn asking,

that in the absence of what you ask for,

your day gets dark, your neck thin

as a spindle, that what you give away

is all you own, that you sacrifice belongings,

sleep, health, your head,

that you often sit down in a fire like aloeswood

and often go out to meet a blade

like a battered helmet.

When acts of helplessness become habitual,

those are the signs.

Excuse my wandering.

How can one be orderly with this?

It is like counting leaves in a garden,

along with the song-notes of partridges

and crows. Sometimes organization

and computation become absurd.

Inside This River

Inside this river there is a moon

which is not a reflection.

From the river bottom the moon speaks.

I travel in continuous conversation

with the river as it goes.

Whatever is above

and seemingly outside this river

is actually in it.

Merge with it, in here or out there,

as you please.

This is the river of rivers

and the beautiful silence of endless talking.

The Verge of Tears

You make our souls tasty like rose marmalade.

You cause us to fall flat on the ground

like the shadow of a cypress still growing at its tip.

Rainwater through a mountain forest,

we run after you in different ways.

We live like the verge of tears

inside your eyes. Don't cry.

You trick some people with gold ropes.

You tie them up and leave them.

Others you pull near at dawn.

You are the one within every attraction.

All silence. You are not alone, never that.

But you must at times become distracted,

because look, you have taken the food

that you were going to give to Jesus,

you have taken that out to the stable

and put it down in front of the donkey.