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Chapter 1 (Abdallah Jones)
Abdallah Jones jumped off the train as it drew near the trestle with the glass ball of disappearing dust in his hand which he…
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1/20/2012 (from The Match That Becomes a Conflagration, unpublished)
Categories: Poems