Month: June 2018

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Outside, the freezing desert night.

This other night inside grows warm, kindling.

Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.

We have a soft garden in here.

The continents blasted, cities and little towns,

everything become a scorched, blackened ball.

The news we hear is full of grief for that future,

but the real news inside here is there’s no news at all.

Friend, our closeness is this:

anywhere you put your foot,

feel me in the firmness under you.

How is it with this love,

I see your world and not you?

Listen to presences inside poems,

Let them take you where they will.

Follow those private hints,

and never leave the premises.

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One dervish to another,

What was your vision of God’s presence?

I haven’t seen anything.

But for the sake of conversation,

I’ll tell you a story.

God’s presence is there in front of me,

a fire on the left,

a lovely stream on the right.

One group walks toward the fire, into the fire,

another toward the sweet flowing water.

No one knows which are blessed and which not.

Whoever walks into the fire appears suddenly in the stream.

A head goes under on the water surface,

that head pokes out of the fire.

Most people guard against going into the fire,

and so end up in it.

Those who love the water of pleasure and make it their devotion

are cheated with this reversal.

The trickery goes further.

The voice of the fire tells the truth saying,

I am not fire. I am fountainhead.

Come into me and don’t mind the sparks.

If you are a friend of God, fire is your water.

You should wish to have a hundred thousand sets of mothwings,

so you could burn them away, one set a night.

The moth sees light and goes into fire.

ou should see fire and go toward light.

Fire is what of God is world-consuming.

Water, world-protecting.

Somehow each gives the appearance of the other.

To these eyes you have now, what looks like water burns.

What looks like fire is a great relief to be inside.

You’ve seen a magician make a bowl of rice seem a dish full of tiny, live worms.

Before an assembly with one breath

he made the floor swarm with scorpions that weren’t there.

How much more amazing God’s tricks.

Generation after generation lies down, defeated,

they think, but they’re like a woman underneath a man, circling him.

One molecule-mote-second thinking of God’s reversal of comfort

and pain is better than any attending ritual.

That splinter of intelligence is substance.

The fire and water themselves: accidental,

done with mirrors.

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Turn from the ocean now toward dry land.

When you’re with children, talk about toys.

From playthings, little by little,

they reach into deeper wisdom and clarity.

Gradually, they lose interest in their toys.

They have a sense of wholeness in them already.

If they were completely demented,

they wouldn’t play at all.

Did you hear that?

It’s the man who was looking for treasure.

He wants me to finish his story.

You didn’t hear him?

Then he must be inside me yelling,

“Over here! Come over here!”

Don’t think of him as a seeker, though.

Whatever he’s looking for, he is that himself.

How can a lover be anything but the beloved?

Every second he’s bowing into a mirror.

If he could see for just a second

one molecule of what’s there

without fantasizing about it,

he’d explode.

His imagination, and he himself, would vanish,

with all his knowledge,

obliterated into a new birth,

a perfectly clear view,

a voice that says, I am God.

That same voice told the angels to bow to Adam,

because they were identical with Adam.

It’s the voice that first said,

There is no Reality but God. There is only God.

Husam pulls me by the ear now,

“Wash your mouth!

By trying to say these things,

you conceal them.

Just finish telling the story about the dervish

who was looking for treasure.

Your listeners love difficulties, not unity!

Talk about world troubles.

Don’t distribute water from the fountain.

They don’t want that.

In fact, they’ve loaded themselves with dirt clods to clog up the fountain.

They’d like to shut it off!”

We are listeners as well as speakers of this mystery,

both of us,

but who else will join this strange companionship?

That’s what Husam wants to know!