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.

Only Breath (1)

Ah, true believers, what can I say?

I no longer know who I am.

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim.

Not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen.

I am not from the East or the West,

not out of ocean or up from the ground.

Not natural or ethereal, not composed

of elements at all. I do not exist.

I am not from China or India, not

from the town of Bulghar on the Volga

nor remote Arabian Saqsin. Not 

from either Iraq, between the rivers,

or in western Persia. Not an entity

in this world or the next. I did not

descend from Adam and Eve or any origin

story. My place is the placeless,

a trace of the traceless, neither

body or soul, I belong to the beloved,

have seen the two worlds as one

and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only

that breath breathing human being.

Empty

Margate Harbour, Joseph Mallord William Turner

When you are with everyone but me,

you are with no one.

When you are with no one but me,

you are with everyone.

Instead of being so bound up with everyone,

be everyone.

When you become that many,

you are nothing. Empty.

When You Feel Your Lips

Moon, by Maria Tepper

When you feel your lips becoming infinite

and sweet, like the moon in a sky,

when you feel that spaciousness inside,

Shams of Tabriz will be there too.

Bonfire at Midnight

Fire of Finland, by Kim Leonard

A shout comes out of my room

where I've been cooped up.

After all my lust and dead living

I can still live with you.

You want me to.

You fix and bring me food.

You forget the way I've been.

The ocean moves and surges in the heat

of the middle of the day,

in the heat of this thought I'm having.

Why aren't all human resistances

burning up with this thought?

It is a drum and arms waving.

It is a bonfire at midnight on the top edge of a hill,

this meeting again with you.