SOMEWHERE IN THE REMOTE ARCTIC

Somewhere in the remote arctic there’s a
vast sea of oval glaciers each set as if
in ivory and extending across the
expanse as if providing steppingstones for God

over black water

from the Inconceivable to the Incontrovertible
as He in an inscrutable mechanism proceeds on
His endless rounds through the

known and unknown universe indefatigably
assisting and peeling back and revealing the
core and manifesting it then concealing it back inside
its rippling golden sheath across each
edgeless horizon as if it were the sun but it is
not the sun it’s a seed the size of the sun

inside our hearts

worshipping within its own solar heaven

and melting each manifestation back again
into its reflecting pool like amber honey

over which he bends His Face

as the dream shatters

(from Stories too Fiery to Sing/Too Watery to Whisper)

POEM BEFORE IT IS WRITTEN

Before this poem comes into being or rather
in real time just as it’s coming into being

it already exists though in no perceptible form
nor even knowable to us though many such

poems might already exist that are far more
epic or supple or full of perfect lines of

cypress trees leading to the fountain whose
rainbow colored spouts intertwine in a

braid that reaches up to heaven in whose
rhythms choirs out of normal earshot can be heard

and before the tips of spray reach the netherest
edges no voices were audible to us

and translating them into sound and meaning is the
poem’s duty like a needle hitting vinyl grooves or

lasers reading digital CD codes
out of the surrounding silences that

not only stretch in all Sahara-like directions from this point
but are intermixed in an echoing way with all the

various ribbons of physical sound possible to our
ears that organ God’s created specially to hear these

otherwise unreachable dimensions

and where in the uncreated mists it existed before
it doesn’t have deep resonant pulse until now

in our own ears or under our eyes or
blind fingertip’s recognitions

2/23/2007 (from Invention of the Wheel)

HE WANTED TO GO ON A LONG JOURNEY

He wanted to go on a long journey
so he closed his eyes and started
counting his breaths until he could see

the snowclad onion roofs of Moscow
the glistening fields of Fayyoum Egypt
the stifling downtown city congestion of Hong Kong
and he was happy swatting flies from his food
and stepping on Passionflower thorns on the Island of Maui
he was happy setting off by train across Central Asia
sitting next to a shepherd in a
coat reeking of lanolin
he was happy listening under the stairs to the
Beethoven concert in Baden Baden on period instruments

and then he got up and instead of
shooting himself with the little pearl-handled pistol in his belt
for the third night in a row
he opened the nearest window and a
star chariot leaned close and opened its
side door to let him enter

and following the map of Albertus Magnus
he lit up the corners of his beloved’s love letters with a
fast blue flame that spelled out what his
vocabulary couldn’t express

She awoke to a table set with small triangular toasts on
bone china plates and a little pot of
honey so transparent and golden
it transformed the spoon that ladled it into sheer ruby

and her lips into plump blueberries closing slowly over a
sky road of doves’ flight over fields of
burnished silver

7/31/2002 (from Through Rose-Colored Glasses)

AESTHETIC 

Poetry is what can’t be said
any other way

Verse is thoughts searching for poetry

8/23/2004 (from Cooked Oranges – image of creature by Salihah Moore, Lion of the Sea)

BUT IT IS WE

A ship is laden with pearls each one
previously strung and it’s going to dock
in your harbor and they’re yours
what will you do?

A face is waiting to be kissed that belongs to
someone you’ve not yet met who knows you from
head to toe who will lead you down the
mountain to safety
will you follow?

The sky is moving closer to you by ultra-dimensional
increments with all its celestially roaring sounds
and all you need do is take one step to
be totally transformed
how will you respond?

These and several other miraculous cataclysms
are taking place each moment under our
gaze and under our fingertips and inside the
accordion music of our heartbeats on a
rainy side street in Paris where no feet
completely touch the ground and the
heady drink is perfectly admissible starlight

The grateful watch floodwaters rise and are
amazed

The ungrateful live in a universe the exact size of their
last suit of clothes complaining of their tight fit
and each speck of lint

Swan lands are always sailing into view

Welcoming signals are always being waved to us by their
friendly inhabitants with no ulterior motives but generosity
from very nearby

God has set the table with hundreds of
personal touches and will be
our attentive Help as we order
unfamiliar dishes for the first time

But it is we who will taste them

                    1/12/2005 (from Cooked Oranges)

A MAN ON THE ROAD TO GOD

I met a man on the road to God with the intense face of an owl –
I felt the closeness of diamond-white feathers in the perfect space of an owl

Eyes of divine penetration burn all the way into our souls –
And ignite us in a blaze of love – the secret grace of an owl

Now the owl is not revered universally as being spiritually wise –
In some places “owl” means “stupid” – what abject disgrace for an owl!

Once I was walking in the woodsy hills above Bolinas Bay in California
And a white owl landed in a treetop in a clearing and stared hard at me – a real ace of an owl!

I may be thinking of that owl when I say this man was owl-like to me –
Maybe in primordial Paradise they’re the same – original birthplace of an owl

My heart opened at this person’s gaze on the road to a Beloved God –
Love flooded both and obliterated both – in the divine outer space of an owl

Ameen – in the thick woods hearing Hu-Hu’s of that voice echoing clear –
Feathers tickling still along my tingling arms – ah the sweet embrace of an owl!

6/5/2002 (from The Flame of Transformation Turns to Light / 99 Ghazals Written in English)

INFINITE CLARITY

Five nights have gone by and not one owl of
poetry has hooted to me out of his tree

Three moths fly in the room from flitter to flitter
their universe perfect within themselves
looking out through tiny cockpit eyes
to navigate from one light to another

Twenty-foot crocodiles slither across delta mud
sometimes leaving perfect imprints of their crocodilic forms
down to perfectly printed toes and plated scales

Moonlight slips quietly into a glass on a windowsill
reflects in the liquid glisten in one flashing eye and even
two flashing eyes at the same time

or a puddle of piss a dog’s left next to a bush
or a zillion or so other earthly reflections

Yet the moon remains itself wherever it
lands always the same white disc throughout its
unfazed variations

It’s all in the rhythm and phrasing that this
multitudinous world gets played out in discrete jerks and pauses
exclamations and praises

which makes its natural condition more like
continuous song than continuous silence

I’m sitting on my bed and a single beige moth keeps
landing or flittering zigzaggedly above my two black pillows

Where will we go O God that we can’t
see now but You see with
infinite clarity?

And Your pure moonlight lands on
with absolute reflectivity?

2/13/2007 (from Invention of the Wheel)

OPALESCENT SOUL 

As humans we have so many things to look after – our nails – our hair – our hearts – our transcendent souls –
We file our nails – we cut our hair – we fall in love or find the true object of the love of our resplendent souls –

A camel stands in silhouette in moonlight on a desert horizon – majestic and nobly still –
The whole scene taken in by our eyes of love – ancient dimension of our luminescent souls!

I see you over the wall in your garden so tenderly tending your red and yellow roses –
You move so slowly you might be a ghost – the most vivid thing your bright quiescent soul

If we veer too far to the left we might founder – if we veer too far to the right we might turn to stone –
The frenzy of movement from side to side is the wild animal of our adolescent souls –

I just ate an animal cracker from the bag – it’s hard to tell what it is – it might be a horse –
The fuzzy and insecure outlines of so many folk show the sad sinking of deeply depressant souls

The door opens and light pours in – in a flash we’re past gross physical being and gone –
Our own outlines disappear altogether engulfed by our death-angel’s incandescent soul

O heart – lift up your sleepy eyelids and look out through the darkling trees!
Wildflowers burst into firework blooms of your efflorescent soul!

Dive down Ameen – through air – earth and water – pass through infernos of fire!
In the depths where sunlight rarely falls – you’ll find your original opalescent soul!

5/30/2002 (from The Flame of Transformation Turns to Light / 99 Ghazals Written in English) (photo by Salihah Moore)

A VISIT WITH MR. BLAKE

William Blake across from me sits here
insisting on whatever it is he insists on and a

great red cape opens up to show an illuminated city he says
is Jerusalem

Not quite the one over there in Palestine
but translucent walls and gates of light as only
Blake can envision

Even pinkish and silvery angels elongatedly
bending above it barely discernable in the
clouds and blowing on long glass trumpets

I look into the lively fire in his eyes those
limpid English blues of his and his

mild-mannered countenance and his almost
whispery elocution of these weighty matters in which

the whole cosmos is swept along in calamitous clouds

and he levels a look at me his right hand raised by his
face and says

“Behold the things we feared have come to pass
but the things we feared the most

may still be abated”

Black horses of smoke whinnying horribly and various
towers tumbling forward

I gaze through transparent Mr. Blake across
wispy ruins that run on for miles hoping he’s
right as usual

“Shall I sing you a song?” he says
I nod and he sings in a soft falsetto of things so
elementally near they become distant as if in a
play within a play in the mind

of the Divine upraised finger of light attesting to what among
all these phantasms is real

and of the graves of the terrestrially wronged
who open their stony mouths to
sing with one voice the sweet
mercy of God and their

ultimate rectification against all forms of
injustice including tyrannies theological

and while he continues singing I can
almost see the Holy One’s smile like buttery golden flakes
slowly descending over everything

Mr. Blake
your hat

the wide-brimmed felt pilgrim’s hat you
wore when you first came here

Your stick
with which you touch the stars Mr. Blake
all aglitter

and the tiny chanting flames you
leave in the air

5/26/2004 (from Underwater Galaxies)

GOD’S SUNLIGHT

Beauty has a way of sinking into
everything we do like a time-lapse
photograph of dark flowers blossoming out of
everything

White horses on a hillside in the rain
couldn’t be more beautiful
and the silvery rain itself whose lateral beads
the wind jangles

Our oceans are as wide as the five oceans themselves
as they lick the continents’ edges over and
over each millennium and yet
the land transpires

And then there’s sky with its galactic
twinklings in a kind of cotton fuzz of
light embedding them in deep space

Our eyes could be trained to see only the
beauty that there is when we see through the
rest to the actual incandescent core of things

Those white horses of the second stanza have
hardly moved but now suddenly
raise their heads and run together
as if the rain were riders or whips
urging them on

And so is our own beauty dormant until
roused and washed in God’s sunlight

and like the wet flanks of those horses
ripples with the musculature of joy

2/8/2007 (from Invention of the Wheel)

LOVE’S PEBBLES THROWN

One day Love came to town to see if he’d
missed anyone

There was a river he swam to refresh himself

New duck hatchlings in a nest under a grassy bank
needed their natural focus reinforced to the motherly
gratitude of their dam

On the way into town he whistled a new tune
and a farmer boy swooned
and three snakes slithered ecstatically into the ground

Colts got love up their nostrils and moist along their flanks
and galloped over hills until the
sun went down

Even little flames in an oven leapt for joy
and made the bread loaves arranged on their shelves
perfectly brown as if reflecting the sun

Which was high overhead when Love got to town

Three on a road out of town came sauntering conversely along
one to go to school one to kill himself unbeknownst to
the others and one to return home before sundown

They met love on the road conversely going into town
and only the suicide recognized him by the
intensity of the gleam in his eye as if the
whole arctic tundra was wide open with aurora borealis
curtains of rose-colored lights shaking like dancers
over its glittering ice
and his heart melted at the sight

Love left them and went on into town

An anchorite in a cave remembered
the essence of his vows and sang a song

A couple in the hills lay back in wet grass
and inhaled each other’s long sighs
having just encompassed heaven’s paradisiacal throng

A fox bit down on a chicken leg after a week of
hunger and wept for joy inside loud and long

The day entered the golden tunnel of its afternoon

No stone was left unturned

No grass blade failed to shiver in Love’s updraft

And all perfections were as if brought into a
jeweler’s room to be reset and polished to a high sheen
as the sun shone

Love in broad daylight from the depths of night’s Throne

None of Love’s pebbles from their own places on earth
left unthrown

5/25/2005 (from Holiday from the Perfect Crime)

ALL OF IT

It can’t be coaxed
the wind
to go thinly into a tiny chamber
except by Allah

Light
unless it is pushed ahead
by invisible forces
swifter than anything
remains in the dark

The captain
atilt on the high seas
unless he turn by Allah’s bright stars
can’t steer to safety

By Allah alone
these things and centipedes
fluttering along a branch
in a hurry or dreamy nights
on a bridge overlooking
moonlight

reflect in the face
like the first cause

Whose Face kept in shadow
unless Allah illumine it

opens this day
for us

8/23/2004 (from Cooked Oranges)

THE SAINT CALLS TO US

The saint calls to us one by one
under a corridor of stars

to savor in the eyes and heart the night’s
sweet dissolution

the earth’s lamplit opening from a deep chamber
to an angelic choir in the same rift
and through the same stones

Calls us out through our wrist-cuffs and
shirt openings button by button

to take that one step from ourselves whose arc
though only a yard across contains an
entire Himalayas and all the seven seas

My heart is a bound package that wants to go
but hears in its causeways the clack of
railroad tracks and their soft replies

If we’re brought out of ourselves on an
empty plain under a howling wind
and the light not strike us dead in an
instant

and the rest of the forest creatures not sit in a
patient circle around us preening their
feathers and grooming their paws and whiskers

If the light not strike us is it because we’ve
become light? Or too dark for it to
penetrate and we’ve simply been caught in its camera flash?

Where was the beginning of this contemplation going?
I wonder to myself half way or more
to its completion

Always at a midway point
even as sightings of land confound or
confirm us

Our hands are to be taken by the
hands of God across the ice to a
warmer climate to thaw us and
expose us to His love

Pious scholars predict doom and salvation in the
same breath and it’s the
same breath sparrows breathe as they
dart from

O Allah help me to my knees

The night is burrowing into itself
and the day is already on its elbows
anxious to flee

4/7/2006 (from Coattails of the Saint)