Rumi
The diver’s clothes lying empty
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You’re sitting here with us,
but you’re also out walking in a field at dawn.
You are yourself the animal we hunt
when you come with us on the hunt.
You’re in your body like a plant is solid in the ground,
yet you’re wind.
You’re the diver’s clothes lying empty on the beach.
You’re the fish.
In the ocean are many bright strands and
many dark strands
like veins that are seen when a wing is lifted up.
Your hidden self is blood in those,
those veins that are lute strings that make ocean music,
not the sad edge of surf,
but the sound of no shore.
The shape of my tongue
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This mirror inside me shows …
I can’t say what, but I can’t not know!
I run from body.
I run from spirit.
I do not belong anywhere.
I’m not alive!
You smell the decay?
You talk about my craziness.
Listen rather to the honed-blade sanity
I say.
This gourd head on top of a dervish robe,
do I look like someone you know?
This dipper gourd full of liquid
upsidedown and not spilling a drop!
Or if it spills,
it drops into God and rounds into pearls.
I form a cloud over that ocean and gather spillings.
When Shams is here, I rain.
After a day or two, lilies sprout,
the shape of my tongue.
The ground cries out
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I feel like the ground,
astonished at what the atmosphere has brought to it.
What I know is growing inside me.
Rain makes every molecule pregnant with a mystery.
We groan with women in labor.
The ground cries out,
I Am Truth and Glory Is Here,
breaks open, and a camel is born out of it.
A branch falls from a tree,
and there’s a snake.
Muhammad said,
A faithful believer is a good camel,
always looking to its master,
who takes perfect care.
He brands the flank.
He sets out hay.
He binds the knees with reasonable rules,
and now he loosens all bindings
and lets his camel dance,
tearing the bridle and ripping the blankets.
The field itself sprouts new forms,
while the camel dances over them,
imaginary plants no one has thought of,
but all these new seeds,
no matter how they try, do not reveal the other sun.
They hide it.
Still, the effort is joy,
one by one
to keep uncovering pearls in oyster shells
Buayancy
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Love has taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.
I tried to keep quietly repeating,
No strength but yours, but I couldn’t.
I had to clap and sing.
I used to be respectable and chaste and stable,
but who can stand in this strong wind
and remember those things?
A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.
That’s how I hold your voice.
I am scrap wood thrown in your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke.
I saw you and became empty.
This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,
it obliterates existence,
and yet when it comes,
existence thrives and creates more existence!
The sky is blue.
The world is a blind man squatting on the road.
But whoever sees your emptiness
sees beyond blue and beyond the blind man.
A great soul hides like Muhammad, or Jesus,
moving through a crowd in a city
where no one knows him.
To praise is to praise how one surrenders
to the emptiness.
To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Praise, the ocean.
What we say, a little ship.
So the sea-journey goes on,
and who knows where!
Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck we could have.
It’s a total waking up!
Why should we grieve that we’ve been sleeping?
It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been unconscious.
We’re groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness around you,
the buoyancy
Granite and wineglass
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You are granite.
I am an empty wineglass.
You know what happens when we touch!
You laugh like the sun coming up
laughs at a star that disappears into it.
Love opens my chest,
and thought returns to its confines.
Patience and rational considerations leave.
Only passion stays,
whimpering and feverish.
Some men fall down in the road like dregs thrown out.
Then, totally reckless,
the next morning they gallop out with new purposes.
Love is the reality,
and poetry is the drum that calls us to that.
Don’t keep complaining about loneliness!
Let the fear-language of that theme
crack open and float away.
Let the priest come down from his tower,
and not go back up!
Water from your spring
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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.
The tent
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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.
The question
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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.
In between stories
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