The minute I heard my first love story,
I
started looking for you,
not knowing how blind that was.
Lovers
don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all
along.
**
Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing,
there is a field -I'll meet you there -
when the soul lies down in
that grass,
ideas, language, even the words "each other" don't make
any sense
**
"No one suffers enough," he said.
"Be the
one who suffers everything
and comes to me with nothing but this
bowl
into which I can pour my
wine."
**
I stood at the edge of insanity,
I came
to a door, I knocked, the door opened....
I was standing on the
inside.
**
believe me
i wasn't always like
this
lacking common sense
or looking insane
like you
i
used to be clever
in my days...
since i was not yet hunted
down
by this
ever-increasing love
Raw, cooked,
boiled
A chickpea leaps
almost over the rim of the pot
where it’s being boiled.
"Why are
you doing this to me?"
The cook knocks him down with the
ladle.
"Don’t you try to jump out.
You think I’m torturing
you.
I’m giving you flavor,
so you can mix with spices and
rice
and be the lovely vitality of a human being.
Remember when you
drank rain in the garden.
That was for this."
Grace first.
Sexual pleasure,
then a boiling new life beings,
and the Friend has
something good to eat.
Eventually the chickpea
will say to the
cook,
"Boil me some more.
Hit me with the skimming spoon.
I
can’t do this by myself.
I’m like an elephant that dreams of
gardens
back in Hindustan and doesn’t pay attention
to his driver.
You’re my cook, my driver,
my way into existence. I love your
cooking."
The cook says,
"I was once like you,
fresh from the
ground. Then I boiled in time,
and boiled in the body, two fierce
boilings.
My animal soul grew powerful.
I controlled it with
practices,
and boiled some more, and boiled
once beyond that,
and
became your teacher."
Do you approve of
love-madness?
I need a
mouth as wide as the sky
to say the nature of a True Person, language
as large as longing.
The fragile vial inside me often breaks.
No wonder I go mad and disappear for three days
every month with
the moon.
For anyone in love with you,
it's always these
invisible days.
I've lost the thread of the story I was telling.
My elephant roams his dream of Hindustan again.
Narrative,
poetics, destroyed, my body,
a dissolving, a return.
Friend,
I've shrunk to a hair trying to say your story.
Would you tell mine?
I've made up so many love stories.
Now I feel fictional.
Tell
me!
The truth is, you are speaking, not me.
I am Sinai, and you
are Moses walking there.
This poetry is an echo of what you say.
A
piece of land can't speak, or know anything!
Or if it can, only within
limits.
The body is a device to calculate
the astronomy of the
spirit.
Look through that astrolabe
and become oceanic.
Why
this distracted talk?
It's not my fault I rave.
You did this.
Do you approve of my love-madness?
Say yes.
What language
will you say it in, Arabic or Persian,
or what? Once again, I must be
tied up.
Bring the curly ropes of your hair.
Now I remember the
story.
A True Man stares at his old shoes
and sheepskin jacket.
Every day he goes up
to his attic to look at his work-shoes and
worn-out coat.
This is his wisdom, to remember the original clay
and not get drunk with ego and arrogance.
To visit those shoes
and jacket
is praise.
The Absolute works with nothing.
The
workshop, the materials
are what does not exist.
Try and be a
sheet of paper with nothing on it.
Be a spot of ground where nothing
is growing,
where something might be planted,
a seed, possibly,
from the Absolute.
This is how the
Mesnevi starts:
Listen to the story told by the reed
of
being separate.
"Since I was cut from the reedbed,
I have made
this crying sound.
Anyone separated from someone he
loves
understands what I say.
Anyone pulled from a
source
longs to go back
At any gathering I am there,
mingling
in the laughing and the grieving,
a friend to each, but
few
will hear the secrets hidden
within the notes. No ears for
that.
Body flowing out of spirit,
spirit up from body. We can't
conceal
thar mixing, but it's not given us
to see the soul." The
reed flute
is fire, not wind. Be nothing.
hear the love-fire
tangled
in the reed notes, as bewilderment
melts into wine. The
reed is a friend
to all who want the fabric
torn and drawn away.
The reed is
hurt and salve combining.
Intimacy and longing
for
intimacy in one song
A disasterous surrender,
and a fine
love, together.
The one who secretly hears this
is
senseless.
A tongue has one customer,
the ear.
The power
of a cane flute comes
from its making sugar in the
reedbed.
Whatever sound it has
is for everyone.
Days full
of wanting, let them go by
without worrying that they do.
Stay
where you are, inside
such a pure, hollow
note.
This is love: to fly to heaven,
every monent to rend a hundred veils;
at
first instance, to break away from breath
--first step, to renounce
feet;
To disregard this world,
to see only that which you yourself
have seen.
I said, "Heart, congratulations on entering
the circle of
lovers, on gazing beyond the
range of the eye, on running into the
alley of the
breasts."
**
Lovers, oh lovers, what remedy is
there? For I am consumed
with
fire, and yet this business is unsettled.
There is no remedy but pure
wine in cups which noble men have
circulated.
The tale of lovers
has no end, so we will be satisfied like this,
and so farewell!
The
answer of Motannabi's saying is this: "A heart which wine cannot
console."
**
There's no love in me without your
being,
no breath without that.
I once thought
I could give up this longing, then though again,
But
I couldn't continue being human.
**
For years, copying other people,
I tried to know myself.
From within, I
couldn't decide what to do.
Unable to see, I heard my name being
called.
Then I walked outside.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to
tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really
want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across
the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is
round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.
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