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.