For me the province of poetry is a private ecstasy made public, and the social role of the poet is to display moments of shared universal epiphanies capable of healing our sense of mortal estrangement—from ourselves, from each other, from our source, from our destiny, from The Divine.
When I pray
the whole world becomes a pair of huge
insect wings behind me, and I am a
standing green insect with metallic
thorax, inhaling distant
zephyrs of intoxicating gas
only a rare breed of
insect can survive,
and when I pray the sky in front of me becomes
light and edged with silver
but the sky behind me becomes gun-metal gray
and filled with heavy storm,
and when I pray
there are negotiations on board ocean liners between
warring countries, and treaties are brought out and
signed in triplicate, and people
bow and shake hands, and an old
mother in knitted shawl next to a
cold stove lets out a deep
sigh and holds her
grandchild closer to her breast,
and when I pray I turn aside from
the chopping block, the gas chamber, the
cocked rifle, the seething self-destructive
hatred in a glance,
swollen knuckles, the poisoned pen,
I turn at an oblique angle to the
political explosion, the downing of airplanes, the
destruction of edible food,
and billows of scarlet velvet blow past the
form of a human standing and facing God
I make when I pray, and
billows like the sails of ancient sailing ships
blow their incandescent white canvas glittering in the
Atlantic sun of new worlds past my
figure of a man standing at the absolute
front edge of his existence, toes on the
prayer carpet, facing God free of all that is
other-than-God
when I pray, and the world becomes
silent when I pray, as silent as the
growing of wood in a thick forest, or the
slow death of an old moose alone on a
hill, or the wheeling of a
young bird in a
sun-drenched sky,
silent as a tomb, but alive, silent as the
sea, but deeper, silent as the
sky, for at the
bottom of the sky, with his forehead touching the
bottom edge, is the
human figure on two straight legs facing
one direction and praying with
one heart of a
person praying, of me when I pray, turned like a
gyroscope, up-ended, twirled in a
great wheel, brought back again to the
upright position, facing
wind and ocean and fire burning down houses
and rain battering roofs and hulls of ships
and mountain-faces fluffy with mountain goats,
and when I pray
the slice comes clean through the terrible drama of
matter, the operatic
tensions of objects clash in space,
the suicidal psychology so intertwined with a
desire for rebirth, and there is a
Rebirth of wonder, a Bromeliad of bright pink
bloom out the middle of the silver green succulent
leaf of the
tropical Bromeliad, and the
prayer is the rebirth of light like live lightning
out the corners of the angles of a two-dimensional darkness
and when I pray I become a
firefly or dragonfly, no, only a
man standing facing forward
to pray.
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3/9/95 (from A Hundred Little 3D Pictures, in preparation)
(Note: I’ve been invited to present a series of eight sessions on poetry, I’m calling The Ecstatic Exchange Seminars on Poetry: Intuitions & Enthusiasms. As a foundational text, I’m using this song from the Diwan of Shaykh ibn al-Habib (raheemullah), which has struck me as being, as well as an all-encompassing directive toward sublimest gnosis, a wonderful Ars Poetica for creative contemplation and heart’s action, as well as writing devotional poetry, or poetry of any kind… )
REFLECTION
Tafakkur
by Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib (may Allah be pleased with him)
Reflect upon the beauty of His artistry on land and sea
And journey through God’s attributes both obvious and hidden
The greatest signs of God’s limitless perfections are found
Within our souls and on the horizons spread across the world
Contemplate all physical forms and behold their structural beauties
In exquisite order like pearls threaded on a string
Journey through the mysteries of human languages and speech
That give voice to what’s hidden deep within our hearts
Contemplate the mysteries of the body’s flexible limbs
And how our hearts command them so often and so easily
As well as the mystery of how our hearts may turn obediently
But then fall back into creeping darkness and transgression
Journey through the earth with all its varieties of plant life
And note how vast are its flatlands and how many its steep ascents
Fathom the mysteries of all the oceans and their fishes
And their numberless waves held back by an unbreachable barrier
Note the mysteries of the winds and how they bring
Both misty fogs and rain clouds streaming down in drops
Travel through the mysteries of all the starry heavens –
The Throne the Footstool and the Spirit sent by God’s Command
Then you will affirm God’s Unity with the totality of your being
And turn away from illusion and vain doubt and all otherness
You will say, “Dear God, You are what I seek!
My impregnable refuge from wrongs injustices and deceit
You – my only Hope in answering all my needs
You – the One who saves me from every evil and every harm
You – the Compassionate One Who answers all who call
You – the wealth that provides the needy in their need
O Sublime One to You I raise my voice in prayer –
Hurry to me the Opening and the Secret O dear God
By the honor of that sublime one all our hopes depend on
On the Day of Distress when we’re assembled at the Gathering
Upon him God’s blessings as long as Gnostics journey
Through the lights of God’s Essence in His every Self Revealing
And his People and Companions and all those who follow
The Divine Commandments by the sweet nobility of his Way.
(version from translations by Aisha Bewley and Abdurrahman Fitzgerald)
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(Since this is all a new venture for me, I can only go by stepping stones laid before me, one at a time. This week we watched a nature program in which an actual white (albino) deer appeared. This reminded me of the great poem of Petrarch (July 20, 1304 – July 19, 1374), in which the white deer appears as a symbolic vision. The first example is in prose translation, the second in a version I’ve made from existing translations from the Italian, and the final one a sonnet from Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 – 11 October 1542), which is based on Petrarch’s sonnet.)
PETRARCH / RHYME SPARSE 190
A white doe on the green grass appeared to me, with two golden
horns, between two rivers, in the shade of a laurel, when the sun
was rising in the unripe season.
Her look was so sweet and proud that to follow her I left every
task, like the miser who as he seeks treasure sweetens his trouble
with delight.
“Let no one touch me,” she bore written with diamonds and
topazes around her lovely neck. “It has pleased my Caesar to
make me free.”
And the sun had already turned at midday; my eyes were tired
by looking but not sated, when I fell into the water, and she
disappeared.
(translated by Robert M. Durling)
FROM PETRARCH
A white doe on green
grass appeared to me with two gold horns
between two rivers in a laurel’s shade,
the sun rising in embryonic season.
Her look was so superbly sweet
that I dropped everything to follow her,
like a miser whose trouble seeking treasure
is made easier by deep delight.
The words “Don’t Touch Me” around her beauteous neck
were written in diamond and topaz.
“My Caesar was pleased to set me free.”
The sun was already halfway through its turn,
my eyes were strained by looking, but not done,
when I fell into the water and she was gone.
— Petrarch
(Rime Sparse 190)
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
— Sir Thomas Wyatt
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(Finally, a poem of mine inspired by the notion of a white deer, and its enthralling magnetism to the Unseen and the Real…)
THE WHITE DEER
It’s even closer than our fingertips
what we’re longing for
and travel for in search of
closer than our jugular
Shangri La lies languorously
always out of reach
its silver trays heaped high with
succulence its windows basking in
perennial sunlight
Darkness wraps the dearness of the
depth we fathom but not distance
and the rhythm of it singing in our
eardrums brings it even closer to us
Can’t call it can’t name it
loss is often the way toward it
less is often more in its regard
as we face the chalk snow always
falling across it
And make the face that was ours before birth
come alive in our eyes then our
nose and mouth and the rest
as if clouds were evaporating away from it
leaving it clear
See the white deer standing so close
on the shore bending to drink then
standing still head held high
before leaping away
its reflection in the water writing in
silvery light our most secret name His
answer to our deepest call?
A moon lightens the picture
and where it was a moment ago
fills with light
I can’t explain why the journey takes us
to the place it does
only to find it’s taken us to our
starting place
A ball of concentrated matter
tightens itself to a point
that speeds through space so fast
it goes nowhere is nowhere then is
all and we liken our destiny to its
fall but it doesn’t fall
I can’t explain why that tiny point soon
covers us over all or
why as we age we haven’t gone
anywhere at all
The white deer bounds through the end of space
faster than light can follow her
and comes up in front of us again to drink
our blood’s clear nectar
Sweet as a vapor trail
flicking its deer’s tail
as we also disappear to be more
tangible to ourselves after all
Closer in a mysterious visibility
to our initial caul
Just back from seeing The Life of Pi, in 3D, overwhelmed by it, and for me a truly cathartic experience. In it we are face to face with, well, in a metaphorical sense, in not overly rigorous tashbih perhaps, God.
A tiger. Blake’s Tyger. Face so profoundly symmetrical, masked and marked, brute and beautiful, snarling and truly dangerous, serenely transcendent, insouciantly in charge, divine beast, vicegerent of the most fearful Names, and all-powerful leashed and unleashed. Glorious.
Near the end, the boy hero looks up and thanks God (not the tiger) for bringing him with the live tiger on the little white lifeboat in the vast ocean, to keep him awake, aware, one-pointed. In focus. And for me, having undergone a summer this year of cancer treatment, every day asking God’s help with the most sincerity I’ve ever had, and the most focus, there was a deep poignancy of that facing-off, that face to face and ever-present encounter, and the film actually opened some locked floodgate of emotion in me when storm and ocean and tiger were over, and in cathartic release, let it out.
We are so brave, we have such faith, yes, but there is a buildup of, not fear really, but encountering the fearsomeness of existence and death, that impinges on us when we’re truly fighting for survival through a sickness, or whatever tribulation. As the boy was on the open sea, tiger constantly before him.
I had watched a short video of Shaykh Hamza Yusuf in the afternoon, on Dunya, this-world concerns. And in it he was saying that dunya is set up to bring us tribulations, a state in which we are closest to God, usually closer than when all’s going well, and that we look to their transformation into ease, as the Companions did, blessings on them all, who endured tribulations in their lives rather than in the practice of their Way, which has a profounder anchor and an unwobbling pivot. For with difficulty is ease. Is ease.
And then in the evening, Life of Pi. Whew. And both, as Shaykh Hamza presented it also, have a happy ending. That we all look forward to a happy ending, and pray and hope for it. And then the film reminded me of a poem from my book, Salt Prayers, poems written in 1998, inspired from another film, Passion in the Desert, where the beast is a leopard, that in turn reminded me of a quote I’d read long ago from Al-Ghazali, raheemullah, whose gist was that if a real lion is at our throats it is no longer a metaphor for God. It is God. The Doer in all doings.
At this moment Life of Pi is up there with Himalaya and Babette’s Feast as the greatest spiritual films I’ve ever seen. They advance you on the Path.
Here’s the poem:
I’M IN LOVE WITH A PANTHER
1
I’m in love with a panther. I’m in
love with her claws, with her
savage breath and those teeth on the
cutting edge of danger. I’m in
love with her eyes which see in a way I
can’t know, not with
human seeing, green-gray, they
flash in the night, spotlit, as if the
light comes from deep inside her and is
laser beamed through her pupils outward. I
love her sleekness. She can be ahead of me in
a pounce, her back flanks rippling with
sheer power. Terror
in the air as she leaps forward. I love that she’s
distant from me in nature, I’m bound by her
strength over me, she could
kill me in a wink and
probably will, most certainly will, when I
least expect it, from the side, or from in
front, with sweet and
ample preparation, closing in on me gradually,
I love that, I love her darkness, sheen of
burnished velvet, she is erotically
charged but far beyond such
passing passions, she
flattens next to me and flicks her ears. She’s picking up
faraway sounds. No sound
escapes her. I love the
shadow she pulls close across me, starting from my
toes and moving upward to my
scalp with hair standing on end.
She looks me full in the eyes, but when I
gaze into those eyes like
freefalling on a night of
absolute blackness, falling deep
into them, it’s nothing
familiar, nothing I can easily translate, it’s
cuneiform hieroglyphics and the
calligraphy of an enticing death, that we
both get wrapped in a black fur cloak and that we
lose our distinct identities, and when the
smoke clears we’re at ease among her
rocks at her accustomed height, just
above the tree line, noses
pressed against a sky so pristine white
it’s like the inside of shell.
2
Her teasing only makes me ask for more.
Reality goes way past metaphor.
She takes me to the edge and I look down.
She crouches forward, face impassive, yawns.
Miles down the rock face is her element.
She’s part of shale and schist, rock, cement.
As easily down an office building’s slope
I look down with my panther at my side, hopeless
as well as full of hope. Black thing. Gorgeous
as death is. Through valley gorges,
peaks, stealthily as well as obviously she goes.
Her blackness starkly silhouetted when it snows.
I’m dandled, played with, left alone, surrounded.
Everywhere I go I’m panther-bounded.
Her purr’s a sound like no sound ever sounded.
Her growl like gurgling tree roots, primordial groan.
With her I’m never lonely, yet alone.
Her roar puts out the night, lights up the moon.
3
My panther who blends into the night
and is gone. Present but
not plainly visible.
Her formlessness spreads out across the sky at dawn.
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6/24/98 (from Salt Prayers, The Ecstatic Exchange, 2005)
I’ll be presenting my poetry at the Sufi Symposium this year in San Rafael, should you be nearby to attend. Check with the website listed for program times, all insha’Allah. (I’m the guy in the red scarf, at the lower right corner, at a diagonal from Coleman Barks.)
None of the many images of action and entity
make the Actor multiple in any way
So whoever rises above every vanishing thing
will be shown existence without duality
— Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib
_________________________________________
Push aside the sauce they say
and there’s the pudding or
push aside the consequences and
there’s the intention
Push aside the subterfuge and there’s the
psychology that engineered the
masquerade intended to
put us off the trail so carefully
plotted
That behind all appearances lies a
single source in multifarious
manifestations if only our momentary
discernment might pick apart the
distracting details enough to find
true causes
But it isn’t all analytical or
philosophical or even psychological
A dancer moves to the center of a
stage to perform meticulous contortions and
flights of purest grace and harmony
hours or even years having perfected each
beat between each click of action
frozen in time as well as each
before and each continuous after
the dance master counting them out at the
side in scruffy clothes and the
dancer starting and stopping before a
room-wide mirror
And behind the dance-master’s meticulous
directions lie ages of expertise
that know of no imperfection
And behind each slide and
sparkle of things or each
collision and resolution domestic or
international are ticks and increments of
perfectly faceted jewel-like eternities
seamlessly bound together between
the flow of befores and afters
a kind of continuous hum almost
audible in our hearts’ ears
a kind of bobbing in the same waters by
moonlight or daylight
never a dull moment as each wave
ripples or crashes by on the
same sea
hiding precarious and mysterious
depths
And there is Allah in all this
each Name divinely aglow as if on a
visible clock face whose energies
almost speak themselves in the
midst of confusion that’s really a
profusion of clear articulation
made by the Single Source
from His ever
cosmos-wide
mirroring
singularly
placid place
__________________
1/20/2012 (from The Match That Becomes a Conflagration, in progress)
(NOTE: With this miraculous “Arab Spring” with all its achievements, it’s good to know our work in the world is for Allah and His Messenger, peace be upon him, and Light in This World and the Next, and our beacons are the prophets and Companions and the awliyya… so this poem, of an anonymous saint, may be cogent…)
When the saint reached his goal
only a chipmunk took notice
all that light pouring out of his room like a
private aurora borealis just for
Him
and scampered home to tell his wife and kids
for a split second the universe stood still from its
usual flipping back and forth from
existence to non-existence and took a quick
look at itself in the mirror of wonder and wondered
if all its lakes would evaporate all its
peaks eventually crumble all its
tombs keep their tenants cozy until time to
unfold like a magnolia bud into flower
then it was back to business as usual and ten-times
greater radius of illumination around his head
which later worker ants took notice of and
passed along the grapevine
waterfall water cascading at its usual
pleasure babies getting born in sterile
hospitals at their usual rate
while like a newborn deer our saint ecstatically
stumbling in fields of God’s glory like so many
sparks from a campfire meeting at the
pinnacle of night or the transformation from a
large top-heavy and earthbound thing to something
suddenly aerial and gliding
free
our friend gravity becoming here now the
dance master of the spirit’s freedom from it
our saint’s happy stuttering across a very
anti-gravitational threshold in order to
appear to us perfectly normal
saying perfecting normal things such as
those are roses those are thorns
the night on its double axel turns
the forward depends on the backward to
define its place
our life is a split-second of joy before
light descends
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(from Shaking the Quicksilver Pool, The Ecstatic Exchange)
