#13
Your desire for love defies the fear that
bookends it. Finding and losing both
unfasten stars from the sky. Will you give up
this world for the one without expectations?
What thoughts came to you when you
sat cross-legged under that peepal tree?
Previous: Tao inspirations #12
#8
You made up these rules. You set the bar for
longing too high. You wanted to be exalted
as a star, as a god. But I know love refused to
play your game. It fell into your arms and fit
its weight into the yearning in your heart. Didn’t
it teach you to fly with your feet on the ground?
#7
Count all the things that are eternal. Then
count all the things that are not. In which
list did you put the love you feel? The love
you received? In which list did you put
yourself? When creation made its lists,
which one do you think it placed you in?
#5
Does love come to you as a kindness?
Does pain seek you in vengeance? Your
poems are your own failings. Think how
much more can be said by your silence. Do
you hear the remonstrations of the moon?
Isn’t she still the greatest of poets?
#3
The moon brings its fullness to fit
into the small of your eye. To blink
would be sacrilege. Would be to
count its failings. Is there a greater
love, a higher love? To seek love is
blasphemy. Your job is just to be.
#2
That which is not you, validates your
being. Pain completes love. Majnun
still wanders in the desert. Isn’t the
flute that sang of love sweeter in its
silence? Is waiting the exposition or
the denouement of togetherness?
#1
When everything was still nameless,
desire made secret pacts with the primal
darkness. From the unmanifest antithesis,
love was birthed as mystery – as the changeable
constant . What else can simultaneously
be both cause and consequence?
Even Rumi, who could fit the entire
universe inside his poem, was yearning
for the grace of the Beloved. The universe
is not enough. It cannot love us the way
we want love. Its miracles are just math.
What would language do, or poems, if
the poet did not suffer the anguish of
loving a sunset? The sky just is. The poem
reaches out to touch your cheek. The
words wipe your tears. The poet burns
in the orange light until he becomes the
darkness. The Beloved holds back the
wine. Love is only an empty tavern, the
sun has been extinguished and the stars
in the window will be gone by morning.
Have you spoken to the ocean recently? Or to Yemen? Or to
a yellow dinghy at the bottom of the Mediterranean? How
about a polar bear? Or a blueprint in a factory somewhere,
for a nastier gun? I can hardly make a list better than your
morning paper. What would you say to a bird perched on a
length of barbed wire separating this from that? Keeping
person from person? Me from you? Don’t ask me. I don’t
speak. I spend the evenings in the balcony, mourning a lost
love. Bemoaning the universe’s broken parts that collude
against me. Thinking about a young Krishna who opened
his mouth to show his mother the entire cosmos within.
Unbroken. I talk to myself. About silence. Endings. About
love. A little bird on the concrete parapet opens its beak to
to scare the encroaching dusk. Darkness falls over us like a
coarse blanket, all at once. Starless. Moonless. Skyless. How
can you bargain for peace when you have nothing to give?
How can you bargain for love? The night takes my hands
away from me. Like plastic, like chemicals, like everything
we made and used and threw away, won’t love turn up
on a distant shore, in the belly of a murdered sperm
whale? Have you talked recently to the naked mountains-
cold, their lips parched in this strange December rain?
Only the mirror changes, showing vibrant orange wings instead
of creeping, hungry green. How vain is the heart that rolls the past
into an impotent caterpillar? What makes the butterfly think the
metamorphosis is complete? I tell myself I am distanced from you,
from that night, from that abrasion of skin upon skin. I am surprised
I can remember. I am surprised by the precision of detail, by the absence
of theatre. I am surprised I have the same eyes. Somewhere behind
a closed door is the opera of sunshine, where time does not exist
or self. Where you can step back into a sentence, where you can reach
out and feel again, where moments look different in each mirror
and you can stand before the one in which you smile. That night
still wears the August moon. I am surprised you have the same eyes.
