Gutters are blocked this morning
With the love that rained all through the night
A muddy overflow of joy!
A playful chaos!
Birds should be able to fly in unapprehended
To share the morning cheese and walnut
Now that love has spoken.
The neighbors’ smiles blend with sunshine
And the smell of real Persian bread
Baked on round hot pebbles is in the air
Writing poetry should find a wholesome new dimension
Now that love has spoken.
November 15, 2000, St.Louis
“Lonely, Limping, Buried under broken leaves”
“Perpetual pines in pale sunset: Indifferent, Deserted, Cold”
“A vision of the end from the rooftops of now,”
“Careless, invading browns covering over the gold”
“Shivering last leaves holding to the ancient oak”
“Dizzy raindrops, a patch of blue, a fleeting rainbow”
“A dancing yellow ending quietly in the fireplace”
“Raging restless wind pushing against the window”
“Tons of acorn waiting to be cracked” interject the squirrels.
Parachuting leaves agree chattering and gliding down:
“How about forests of red blooming in one ‘autumn sunset’?”
“And all the dancing gold mingling bravely with brown?”
“How about the explosion of coppers imbued with longing?” I add
“The ravishing reds alive and glowing with desire?”
“Dancing around a shy tormented willow”
“Real red Indians celebrating around a fire.”
“Next to the few pines insisting on the supremacy of green”
“How about the shades of bright yellow I didn’t know existed”
“All the purples and maroons that refused to be described”
“Now bursting into the laughter that had quietly persisted”
Sitting silent, looking absent, feeling down
Dusty yellow, lifeless gray, fading brown
Blushing purple, golden yellow, dancing green
Touching gentle, talking lucid, feeling serene
November 12, 2000
As I drive home,
A few words pass me by
And a pair of smooth seductive phrases
Joking, pulling each other’s hair, running
They vanish in the dark.
“Will I see them again?” I wonder
A victorious giggling rings in the park by the sidewalk.
I feel left behind, empty, unwanted
As they loose themselves in the large bush
Behind the fences.
To dilute the pain of defeat
I get into attack posture
And break into a self-rebuking monologue
“You did it again!”
“Lost them”
“Go on! Cry!”
“Another grand moment of talking
“Lost before being born!”
“Go on! Cry!”
The self-teasing fails to amuse
I am angry
Mortally incomplete
I want all my giggling deserting words back
By the time I get out of the car
I am feeling somewhat better
Finding my way around in a delicious fantasy
The words are in the palm of my hands
I am gazing at them
In search of the space they hide inside
The space I discover with wonder
Every time I crack a word open.
And Every time I crack a word open,
It stretches before my feet
Into a road I have not taken before
Leading to some indescribable somewhere
I absolutely have to visit for myself.
The visit I don’t recall
But on that road
The shapeless, voiceless, withdrawing me
Finds her face and her feet
And walks right to the threshold of splintering far and wide
Eventually finding the courage
To come together in a song
And crystallize in the little space
The words have to offer.
A little give and take happens
-and some quarreling
As in all cohabitation
Leading to a union (of the Ibn al-Arabi sort
I would say)
Seeing the state you were always in
Only did not recognize!
And I am home
In a way I have never been before
Perfectly lost
Without the slightest urge
To look for a destination.
I am out of the driveway now
Walking into the house
The phone is ringing
The windows look anxious
I am already thinking about dinner
The words now
Have the chance of their lives to disappear
In their favorite spots
Behind the dirty plates in the washing machine
Or beneath the grated carrots in the salad bowl.
I let a dismissive mood take over
What is it with talking anyway?
That is so laden
With the threat of remaining undone?
So intertwined with the danger of never making it
Out of the silence
Into which it will sink back anyway.
I am grating carrots
With the fervor of an ancient warrior
In a defeated camp
Sharpening his rusty sword
For the decisive battle next dawn.
It is a late Friday afternoon
I walk back into my office exhausted.
Grabbing my briefcase to leave
I find a rare bird
Perched on my computer screen
-of all places!
Waiting to be lured in and described.
A wave of laughter goes through me,
As I lock the door to leave.
An intriguing bird!
A chance to talk!
And this time, not a single word will escape!
The bird is watching me drive home.
St. Louis, Oct.29, 2000
Being born in that land
And having lived there for many years
He knows how to converse
With old keepers of the gates of wisdom
Perhaps better than the natives themselves!
(But that is uncertain
Since he has never come face to face
In the land of the departed giants he adores
With one exciting living mind!)
In all his years there, too
Even as a young boy,
He showed his respect
By being completely honest with the natives
Never pretending to emulate them.
Though somewhat restrained
In terms of role models
He stayed loyal to the example of the decent man
He knew well
The only white man in town
To be exact, his own father.
He has, of course, maintained peaceful relations
All the way through
With the quietest, and most shadowy of the natives.
They still populate his thoughts and dreams
And will perhaps do so for as long as he lives
With their small unrecognizable figures
And slanted eyes
Always in groups…and never saying much.
Invited from campus to campus
He now lectures
About the world’s great “wisdom traditions”
Looking wise, and somewhat shaken by age.
People shout their stories of his selfless devotion
to learning
So he can hear them well
And feel convinced of their own devotion
As they talk about his
Dinners in his honor go on for some time.
The Dinner has just ended
Empty glasses and cups,
Tired faces,
Late night smiles retreating into sparkless eyes
Politeness wearing thin.
He looks old, pale and unconvinced
As I say goodbye to slip out quietly.
Out in the night’s cool air
Where rain drops have been busy in my absence
There is an unprecedented freshness
I am greeted by the warm, noisy, welcoming night
A wondrous longing to soar comes over me
And a desire
To expand and inhale the timeless dark.
I stretch out my arms
And open the palms to feel the mist
The urge to run takes over.
I get in the car and rush home
To my bookcase in the sitting room
Searching furiously on the shelf
For my old printed collection
of El Greco’s paintings:
“O El Greco! Where are you?”
“ I need your eyes!”
“ I need to remind myself of the way you see!”
“ The way you defeat smallness”
“The way you shout with pale quiet faces”
“And capture greatness in exaggerated fingers
and bony arms.”
“I feel blind-folded”
“ I feel locked in a box”
“Get me out of this entangled web of smallness ”
“O El Greco! Please be found!”
I find the collection of paintings
And rush to the tall half-covered figure of John the Baptist
Standing on a pair of extraordinary legs
Holding to a long wooden cross
With over stretched fingers
That ought to look funny but do not.
And immediately on the next page
“Christ bearing the Cross”
His upright figure looming large in the
center of the painting
His hands exaggerated way beyond proportion
His broad shoulders covered in a majestic red robe
His large brown eyes fixed on something outside the painting
Not far from where I sit
I gently bring my hands down
And put them on the painting
To trace with the tip of my fingers
the blood dripping on his ivory pale face
And feel
The reassuring warmth
Of the love that gives
And seeks no approval
The mighty river that washes over aloof mountain tops
And my small figure, too.
Tears roll down my face with relief
My blind-fold coming undone
My hands moving across his pierced forehead
To his eyes unconcerned with my gratitude
His body spread across the page
Filling the horizon from end to end
O El Greco! El Greco
How can I thank you?
October 2nd, 2000, St. Louis
The trees watch in silence
The sluggish night that falls on my heart.
The red tint of sadness in the air
Says the “thief” is loose in the neighborhood
I Wonder if the moments of longing
Would find their way back after dark
The chapter I will teach tomorrow says:
“The souls are mere aspects
Of the breath of the merciful.
All separate things are God knowing himself!”
I close my eyelids tight
And press hard to picture
Ibn al-Arabi as he says such unheard things
in Cordoba, Damascus, or some other giantland!
Instead I see
My anxious, undergrad/believer in the first row
Who will, no doubt, protest:
“But how can evil be God?
“How can anyone think that?”
I search for a proper way
To handle his anxious feelings
Ibn al-Arabi whispers from the next page
With a smile on the face I have lent him:
“The knowledge that He is All in all
Should have the same fire
The same transport and rapture
As the joining of two lovers.”
I am getting out of the car
In front of Elizabeth’s house
To be the Royal princess from the far-off lands!
Presiding over a poetry competition
The melting dark is a noisy river
Ibn al-Arabi laughs out loud in Damascus
I feel light as a bubble flowing with the night.
September 26, 2000, St. Louis
“I have a thirsty fish in me
That can never find enough
Of what it is thirsty for
Show me the way to the ocean…” Rumi, Divan: 1823
I press my guitar tight
Against the bruise in the center of my chest
The footprint of longing.
The incompleteness of the moment
-the slender string in the dark-
Pulls with the power of a magnetic field
As my fingers move on the fingerboard
In search of drifting songs
Ebbs and flows
Cool ocean currents
To calm the thirsty fish inside.
The summer night is alive
With a million crickets singing outside my window
In the morning
I get to the park early
Running and breathing in
Every blade of grass
Until the little silvery cup in me
Is filled with a rare dancing green
Which I would call
“The essence of all summery gardens”
If it had to be called something!
Puzzled, charmed, mesmerized
With the longing, the incompleteness
That remains from the night before
That radiates from the center of my chest
I run and look for the ocean
in bright sunshine
“I can die with the joy of this longing”
I think as I drink the cool morning mist
“Or live two hundred years!”
Later,
In the kitchen
I listen to a drummer working wonders on the “daf”
And chop onions for a Persian dish
Moving to the rhythm of the “daf”
I smile at the finely chopped little sound bits
That dance with me on the kitchen floor
“A completed sentence has said
Everything it has to say.”
I catch myself thinking
“The summer night is alive
Until the crickets long for singing.”
“If turning in circles stops
Whirling will end!”
I laugh out loud
Intrigued suddenly
With the charming incompleteness of the universe
Not chopping onions anymore
My hands search on my chest
For my share of incompleteness
Onion bits are whirling in the pot
I am dancing bare feet on the kitchen floor
The daf plays loud in my chest
Cool playful ocean waves
Clime up my toes and reach my ankles
Scattering pebbles on the floor I cleaned the night before.
September 18, 2000, St. Louis
“I have a thirsty fish in me
That can never find enough
Of what it is thirsty for
Show me the way to the ocean…” Rumi, Divan: 1823
I would take middle roads, if I must
But I have to warn you,
Walking a sober slow pace is not one of my strengths.
In fact, I usually forget to walk altogether,
Distracted by the wonders of the world around me,
Until something goes wrong,
Panic strikes and the slow are trampled under feet.
Then the whirling me comes to life,
And dances its way through the dead end.
Dancing is one of my strengths.
I am somewhat unusual, I would say
I demand the right to be a foolish moth,
Anytime my heart soars,
Or the urge to fly builds up in my wings.
Sometimes flying into naked flames,
Is the quickest way to touch the glow of life.
And I must admit,
Patience is not one of my strengths.
Are you a moth?
Will you be one for me?
Do you have a dancer inside?
Will you whirl your way through times of separation?
There is so much that I know and yet don’t know about you.
Will you be patient for both of us?
Will you be patient when I ask for what I already have?
When I ask for all of you, all the time?
I understand if you feel scared
By my dancing too close to the flames.
But will you promise not to let giving
Feel like balancing on a tight rope?
When it should really feel like
Opening up to a comforting breeze.
Will you be a river and flow around the boulders that block
Your way?
Being reasonable is not one of my strengths
But I promise not to argue with the shape of the earth.
Whatever you do
You must remember
Always
To let me be the “thirsty fish”
The fish “that never finds enough of what it is thirsty for”
Being able to be thirsty is my true strength
Don’t look for a cure
Just bring the ocean in the palm of your hands
And I will let the joy of drinking every drop
Be a dance to the rhythm of our heartbeats
Piercing the silence of hesitation till the end of time
Remember! Dancing is my other strength.
St. Louis, September 10, 2000
“I have a thirsty fish in me
That can never find enough
Of what it is thirsty for
Show me the way to the ocean…” Rumi, Divan: 1823
The thirsty fish is here
All day…all night
The ever longing for more
The dream of a distant blue
And the captive seagull inside
Agitating to break open the cage of my body.
“How much more of this longing can I take?” I speak into
the void, hoping no one answers back
And hear my own panic-stricken voice
“Where is the ocean? Is there an ocean?”
And sit as waves of fear wash over my exhausted body…
My anger finds a chance – and a tired
And does not lose a moment”:
“What do you call this? Longing?
“More a devastating quake”
“A fiery flash of lightening
“That leaves no greenness alive”
“And God, it is pathetic!
“The way you are drawn to it!
“As if its fiery lashes
“Were a refreshing drink of water
“Or food from heaven for your starving soul
“Don’t you see? This ‘longing’ only feeds itself!”
I am too tired to argue,
And smell conspiracy in everything
Even in the gentle whispering unknown
That echoes in my heartbeat:
“Run!
“Run to the flame and end it all!
“Don’t be afraid!
“This is the way to begin”
There is all the temptation in the world to do just that
But I am too tired to run
Tired even to be afraid
All I can do
Is to grab the confusion of the moment
And hold it tight
Feeling the comfort of not being able to clarify anything
Or to tell who is “right”
I wake up to a gentle comforting breeze
And to the thought of your smile,
A shimmering cool blue on the distant horizon
I reach out and feel
The wave of serenity
That wraps around my whole body
And look!
I never set foot outside my shady garden
The ocean journeyed to meet me!
St. Louis, Sept. 7 2000
We begged him to come
Not because he was desperately needed
But because his absence would have left a dangerous gap
We could not afford.
He arrived
After a lengthy debate with himself
With a quiet disposition
And a sincere disbelief in our good will.
Later,
In small gatherings in which we tried to make him feel at home,
He would often not say much
Except in shy disjointed phrases
That came out as loud bursts of disagreement.
One could have even liked
These crude, almost offensively honest, remarks
If it were not for the arrogant conviction in his voice
That he could not be other than right.
His face lit up when manuscripts and dictionaries were mentioned
It was almost as if someone else had temporarily borrowed
His face.
He loved languages
And most of all roots of verbs
Not because they could be celebrated as fertile sources of derivation
But because he could substitute
A history of their morphological behavior
For curiosity about the splintered, panoramic allusions
They must have spread in the air
When people of the past spoke them
In fact, verbs loomed so large on the horizon
That little room was left for the speakers.
In a way, the entire history was a nuisance
A disruption of the “truths” one ought to be seeking
The “truths” he knew had always existed
Tucked away in between the golden layers of classical ages
And had been known
To unrivaled masters of conceptual skills
Beyond the grasp of many a modern intellect.
Now, he stood shoulder to shoulder with these masters everyday
And unearthed such truths from the disappearing depths of rarely
Understood texts
Celebrating, in the process, the self-inflicted loneliness that
Despite its chronic pain
Made him shine like an old precious jewel
Set on a cheap machine-made modern ring
But a rare jewel nontheless.
The students resisted him, with all their young stubborn might
We did not press them to change their minds
When the end of his short term with us came
He did not insist on staying longer
Neither did we.
He took his quiet disposition, love for verbs,
And occasional loud disagreements…and left
Having never touched us or been touched by us.
Two passers by going in opposite directions
We found ourselves face to face for one instant
And bowed
Not out of overwhelming reverence, I suppose
But because a handshake would have been a lie.
Perhaps we were too unpredictable, too noisy, too disturbing
For him.
Perhaps we disrupted the neat conceptual arrangement of the
“truth” as he knew it.
Perhaps we were too much like history
Moving too fast for comfort
And better to be avoided.
St. Louis, Sept. 2000
Back from India
Still fragrant with spices and colorful silk
Radiating the serenity of walking in shady bazaars
She runs into me in the corridor of Busch Hall
And that brings tears to her eyes
Overwhelmed with the generosity, I put my arms around her
Back in my office – still overwhelmed-
I reach out for Rumi’s Divan
And start with a short ghazal
Which opens like a gentle discrete song
And there upon, in his shocking habit of teasing and tricking
Expands quickly beyond the page
Until it spreads beneath my feet
Like an exquisite red carpet
Leading from the second floor of Busch Hall
To some remote, inviting, intimidating Mountain top.
“What a place to be ecstatic in!” I think to myself
I think, half amused, as I close the door of my office,
And get distracted with the curious light that filters through the shades
The pulsating unknown!
And the joy!
That spreads like a wave of heat
Or an explosion of light
From the core of my body to the smallest object in the room
And my heartbeat in the background
Like a magnificent daf played by a master drummer
Interrupting the flow of silence
With neatly carved pieces of geometric sound
Holding tight to my chair
In the left corner of my office – with my back to the computer
And still worried about the class I am to teach in half an hour
I know exactly what happened 760 years ago
When someone I know well whirled for the first time.
St. Louis, August 31, 2000
