The Gift, page 12
To go nuts
And start grabbing each other.
Someone sees this,
Calls a
Shrink,
Tries to get me
Committed
For
Being too
Happy.
Listen: this world is the lunatic’s sphere,
Don’t always agree it’s real,
Even with my feet upon it
And the postman knowing my door
My address is somewhere else.
AND THEN YOU ARE
And then You are like this:
A small bird decorated
With orange patches of light
Waving your wings near my window,
Encouraging me with all of existence’s love—
To dance.
And then You are like this:
A cruel word that stabs me
From the mouth of a strange costume You wear;
A guise You had too long tricked me into thinking
Could be other—than You.
And then You are . . .
The firmament
That spins at the end of a string in Your hand
That You offer to mine saying,
“Did you drop this—surely
This is yours.”
And then You are, O then You are:
The Beloved of every creature
Revealed with such grandeur—bursting
From each cell in my body,
I kneel, I laugh,
I weep, I sing,
I sing.
THE INTELLIGENT MAN
The intelligent man quickly realizes
The impotence of
Gold.
THE CHORUS IN THE EYE
Your eye has a melody we want to hear.
God rises from a tuned instrument.
The sun and moon
Will gladly wear robes
And sway as playful children
When the Pir* directs Light.
Hafiz,
Could you slip magic into sounds
Then pour them
Into the earth’s bruised ear?
Hafiz, could you whisper the luminous
Close to each wayfarer’s body
And let the whole world know
About the Beloved’s
True nature?
Yes, dear ones, I can,
Listen to one of my favorite words
That the Friend too is always saying to us:
Mashuq, Mashuq
(Sweetheart).
The chorus in the heart needs to sing.
Love is sovereign and ceaselessly moves
*Persian: saint
From the tuned clay drum,
Chanting, humming all day long, Mashuq,
Mashuq to everything.
FIND A BETTER JOB
Now
That
All your worry
Has proved such an
Unlucrative
Business,
Why
Not
Find a better
Job.
THE LUTE WILL BEG
You need to become a pen
In the Sun’s hand.
We need for the earth to sing
Through our pores and eyes.
The body will again become restless
Until your soul paints all its beauty
Upon the sky.
Don’t tell me, dear ones,
That what Hafiz says is not true,
For when the heart tastes its glorious destiny
And you awake to our constant need
For your love
God’s lute will beg
For your
Hands.
EIGHTEEN
When the Sun Conceived a Man
What could Hafiz utter about that day
When the Sun conceived a Man,
Gave birth to Itself
As Reality and Truth?
What justice could all the speech in creation
Ever say
About that resplendent morning
When the Eternal Handsome One
Let His face
Reappear by grace in form?
There is something I have seen
In the interior of Muhammad
That is the luminous root
Of all existence,
Independent of space and time’s
Novice dance
Across a single lute string
Of the Infinite.
What can even the love of Hafiz express
For the Ancient Sweet Man
Who forever begets compassion
And divine playfulness?
What can the vortex of my sublime wit,
Insight, and gratitude ever say
About the Father of the Perfect Ones,
When they, themselves,
Can turn you into God?
I carry gifts today
From the kings of fish, beasts, birds,
And angels.
I carry gifts today
From rivers, seas, fields, stars,
And from every soul,
From every soul—
That will ever
Be!
Beloved
Let us know
What light first saw and said
When it discovered
You,
Then leaped and swooned
In such a wonderful laughter
That light became
This earthen floor
And sky.
O, Eternal One,
On this ever present holy day
Forget your divine reserve—
Throw wide the Tavern doors.
Give all your thirsty loyal rogues
A drink of your sacred vintage,
Free us from ourselves a while
With the blessed consuming knowledge
Of your Omnipresent Being.
We are your yearning brides, why hide it?
We are singed dervish moths.
Our souls know
Of that immaculate fire you keep
That belongs to us!
Even death now will have no power
To quiet your Name
From beating wildly in our hearts.
Wayfarer,
Now is no time to sit still
For nothing but a great clamor of joy
And music
Can make any sense
Today!
A MIME
A mime stands upon a gallows
For a crime he did not do.
When given a last chance to speak,
He remains true to his art.
A crowd of hundreds has gathered
To see his last performance,
Knowing he will not talk.
The mime takes from the sky
The circles of bright spheres,
Lays them on a table,
Expressing deep love
For the companionship and guidance
They have given him for so many years.
He brings the seas before our eyes,
Somehow a golden fin appears, splashes.
Look, dear ones, there is turquoise rain.
He removes his heart from his body and seems to
Arouse all life on this splendid earth
With such a sacred tenderness,
There for an extraordinary moment
It looked like someone was giving birth
To the Christ again.
He mounts his soul upon the body of Freedom.
The great Breeze comes by.
The sun and moon join hands,
They bow so gracefully
That for a moment, for a moment
Everyone knows that God is real,
So the tongue fell out
Of the mouth of this world
For days.
THE QUINTESSENCE OF LONELINESS
I am like a heroin addict
In my longing for a sublime state,
For that ground of Conscious Nothing
Where the Rose ever
Blooms.
O, the Friend
Has done me a great favor
And has so thoroughly ruined my life,
What else would you expect
Seeing God would do!
Out of the ashes of this broken frame
There is a noble rising son pining for death,
Because,
Since we first met, Beloved,
I have become a foreigner
To every world
Except that one
In which there is only You
Or—Me.
Now that the heart has held
That which can never be touched
My subsistence is a blessed
Desolation
And from that I cry for more loneliness.
I am lonely.
I am so lonely, dear Beloved,
For the quintessence of
Loneliness,
For what is more alone than God?
Hafiz,
What is more pure and alone,
Magnificently Sovereign,
Than God.
NEEDING A MIRROR
Your
Eye
Is so wise
It keeps turning, turning
Needing to touch
Beauty.
It keeps turning,
Needing to find a mirror
That
Will caress you
As I.
ZIKR
Remembrance lowers the cup into
His luminous sky-well.
The mind often becomes plagued and can deny
The all-pervading beauty
Of God
When the great work of zikr *
Is forgotten.
I have chained my every dancing atom
Into a divine seat in the Beloved’s Tavern.
What I have learned
I am so eager to share:
Every ill will confess
It was just a lie
When the golden efforts of your love
Lift the precious wine
To your mouth.
Remembrance of our dear Friend
Lowers the soul’s chalice
Into God.
Look, my sweet efforts and His Sublime Grace
Have now turned Creation into a single finger
On my hand
*Persian: remembrance
And from the vast reservoirs
In my heart and palms
Hafiz offers
God.
THE TENDER MOUTH
What will
The burial of my body be?
The pouring of a sacred cup of wine
Into the tender mouth of
The earth
And making
My dear sweet lover laugh
One more
Time.
GREETING GOD
I hear
The nightingale greeting
God.
I hear
The rain speaking to the roof
Of my heart.
Like a winter blanket of snow gently
Tucking in the earth
I let a great yearning within my ken
Lay down next
To Him.
I hear
A sorrowful lover being true
No matter what, even if the Beloved seems
Cruel.
Tonight
There is a jeweled falcon singing in a
Blessed pain using the tongue
Of
Hafiz.
REACHING TOWARD THE MILLET FIELDS
It was beautiful,
It was so beautiful one night
We all began expecting to hear
God speak
In the waves reaching toward
The millet fields,
From the mouths of the hanging sky-ornaments
Crooning in light’s intimate codes,
From the glances of plants and children
Playing with effulgent love.
Existence was so beautiful one night
We all began to expect
Our Beloved would
Speak
At the height of our wing’s senses
That were stunned
Trying to comprehend the divine
Through the tiny organic
Filters,
That were stunned in glimpsing the reality
Of the thousand miraculous components
Of each moment
And step.
But we can’t,
We can’t yet hear God whistling inside,
So we weep.
We will all weep in some way
Until we
Do.
NINETEEN
Lousy at Math
Once a group of thieves stole a rare diamond
Larger than a goose egg.
Its value could have easily bought
One thousand horses
And two thousand acres
Of the most fertile land in Shiraz.
The thieves got drunk that night
To celebrate their great haul,
But during the course of the evening
The effects of the liquor
And their mistrust of each other grew to such
An extent
They decided to divide the stone into pieces.
Of course then the Priceless became lost.
Most everyone is lousy at math
And does that to God—
Dissects the Indivisible One,
By thinking, saying,
“This is my Beloved, he looks like this
And acts like that,
How could that moron over there
Really
Be
God.”
THE SUN IN DRAG
You are the Sun in drag.
You are God hiding from yourself.
Remove all the “mine”—that is the veil.
Why ever worry about
Anything?
Listen to what your friend Hafiz
Knows for certain:
The appearance of this world
Is a Magi’s brilliant trick, though its affairs are
Nothing into nothing.
You are a divine elephant with amnesia
Trying to live in an ant
Hole.
Sweetheart, O sweetheart
You are God in
Drag!
BETWEEN OUR POLES
Who
Can I tell
The secrets of love?
Who has not confined their life
To a padded cell?
Look at
The nature of a river.
Its size, strength, and ability to give
Are often gauged by its width
And current.
God
Too moves between our poles, our depth.
He flows and gathers power between
