Somehow the resonance for me during the entertaining of this title as an abiding albeit background theme for the poems, was the perfect crime of our existence: perfect because created by a perfect Creator. A crime because we get up to such malfeasance all the time, at the lower end of it, and a crime at the higher end in the sense that the Sufis often mention, that any existence of theirs before Allah ta’ala, any flake or residue of their self-ness, is a crime, a flaw, an obstruction before the Light of God. Only when you have known a saint (wali) of whatever spiritual practice do you get the sense of a personality honed to its finest before the divine consciousness, whose actions and words and thoughts are soaked in divinity to such a degree that the person is truly human in its essence and effaced before God in His ever-present and infinitely Merciful activity.
Poem Selection from Holiday from the Perfect Crime
The Bullet
The bullet sped through the air going nowhere
Aunt Martha was ironing
ironically enough
On a high balcony
in Barcelona
Larvae take a few hours or days
to mature and then
look out!
The clothes were neatly pressed in a pile
and then piled in a press
Time has a way of keeping still
for important events
Nothing greases silence better
than an important event
Time was winding down
and space was sharpening to a point
Travel from A to B is often sudden
and brutal
A direct consequence of a true
concatenation of events
poising a conclusion on the
head of a pin
which punctures the silence
with a bang
heard round the world
from balcony to bridge to battleship to
bathysphere bobbing in the bath of life
The bullet sped forward and
didn’t look back
With grim determination
it didn’t know where it was going
Though where it landed was the
end of all knowledge itself
As many waves as crest on the open sea
or clouds in the scudding sky
Or something whistling through the wind
to deliver destiny’s personal blow
like a signed love letter dipped in scent
and sent through the perfume of the air
to a fair beloved
Though we don’t know it each blow is a
love blow
The children were playing on the terrace
hoops and jacks and hopscotch and clue
The president was signing documents at his desk
flags of all nations furled and unfurled
behind him
Like a kiss it landed where it
needed to land
Sent from a serious hand
The young soldier in mid-sentence
put a period to his life sentence
Though he never finished his last sentence
sentenced to eternal transcendence
Aunt Martha ironed another shirt
he’d wear only once
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
