You’ll sing a song from somewhere out of your depths
and light will hit it and it’ll be
a diamond brooch worn at the back of
Layla’s head in a sunny glade
it’ll be a drop of water hanging at the
tip of a leaf in a dark rainforest radiating diamond light
a deep chasm with a train trestle above it and an
old fashioned train chugging along
oblivious to all danger over a giant arc filled with blue smoke
when you open your heart to sing
the whole room becomes a single ear
or even no ear at all but more like a
sharp point say of a needle about to
enter a cloth to sew
a saintly sleeve to the main body of the divine garment
the exact tip of the needle the sound-receiver
for the entire universe made drunk in the
sudden echoing orbit of your song
God of the dew and the dew’s disappearance
of the pelican walking a pier and the
next day’s tsunami
of a face caught in a window and the
window’s blankness and blackness one second later
God in Whose invaluable Presence we rely without
seeing You though I’ve always contended the
orbs of sight through which we see are
proof of You beyond refutation
And into Whose Presence we call on to be
absorbed just as shadows are drawn into both
light and darkness without objection
And how both light and darkness are absorbed
in each other alternatively without objection
And how a crash of cymbals gradually
dies away until one struck note of the
heavenly celesta is audible again
And hoof prints like zippers in the snow over the
hill disappear both in thaw and in more sheets of snowfall
And of pain and its gradual ceasing in
both directions
toward relief or toward the sheer snowfall of totality
There’s a garden out back in the night now
but I know what’s growing and the
riot of color however silent it remains
And the silent multitudes of people whose
mouths are sealed with fear or forbearance
waiting for You to remove their seals personally
like a wine merchant readying his
products for sale knowing how perfectly they’ve aged
This poem is going nowhere but to You
God of an earth whose epiphanies are
ceaseless and constitute a
continuum
Who’s at ease in the knowledge of the
exact shape of the cosmos as if it were a
small sculpture on a table in front of You which You
take up to observe more closely
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)
As if a windsock could tell
which way the spirit is blowing
or a cascade know the exact configuration of
all its falling drops
Just as no statistician can exactly
track where each of us is going
and where our jumpy thoughts will
take us to the interior or to the edge
where smoke rises like corkscrewing
cypresses into a blue bloated sky
and nothing is exactly as it seems
But who has God’s true optical gauge?
The leap of wild beasts across a
narrow divide
or an electric shot of lightning that
seems to jag horizontally low to the ground
or a sudden silence in a room full of
people might go some distance
to explaining what it is that so
dazzles and intrigues us onward
in spite of the herds of stubborn mules
crossing our path
or our narrow escapes from flash
floods and fire into relatively
normal deliriums where at least the
bobbing faces at our sides and afloat all
around us are angelic in shape
and earnest in their general demeanor
Too much chatter Pipe down! and
too much silence I can’t hear you!
To much death crowded with
to much life Back off a little please!
Go easy on all those seemingly
indiscriminate inclusions
and let some sparrows go from
falling and catch some of the
falling sparrows in the sweet
benevolence of your hands
A supreme certainty slides up the
straws from all our liquid refreshments
while a supreme indifference looks on the
least of us with tears in its eyes
and none of us goes home alone at
last without at least a
companionable zebra or two or
the shadow of guidance visibly
up ahead who waits for us through every
calamity
and around the bend from every
unforeseen disaster
_______________________________________
1/3/2009 (from Sparks Off the Main Strike, The Ecstatic Exchange, 2010)
The magnitude is impossible to deduce
from this side of the sky
From the other side of the sky
everything’s possible
A man with a deer’s head teaching mathematics to
a classroom of students who ring like bells
A plateau of goats on their hindlegs doing somersaults
as their shepherdess reads to them from tablets of silk
Astronomers who simply point to somewhere in the sky
and stars and planets call out their names
in audible voices as clear as trumpets
A land of waterfalls so plentifully lustrous
everyone’s flotation devices are biologically supplied
A central globed arena rotating in ten different speeds of peacefulness
without seeming to move at all or ever come to anything like a stop
Migrating birds seen in one direction in profile
making the shape of our ecstatic faces sailing through blue sky
The staggeringly bright radiance that
floods God’s universe
in dark shadow compared to the
workshop He works from
which is everywhere at once
and every time and every place
simultaneously present in the spark
suspended in air
which is this world we perceive and
grieve over so seriously
barely a blink of light
as it falls into our hands
leaving a star-shaped scar
that heals before it wounds
because the magnitude of all this is nearly
impossible to deduce
from anything anyone does or says
except the light in our eyes
and what our hearts recite
so precisely and gloriously
in the immeasurable magnitude
of a single heartbeat
_______________________________
1/2/2010 (from The Throne Perpendicular to All that is Horizontal, unpublished)
Because he began as a baby and will end as an old man
because the rose has a stem and isn’t all the way rose
because the looming building casts a long shadow the squat
building a short
and we don’t really see the faces of insects the way
probably other insects see them
because there’s a quantum gulf between the
human world and the insect one
and probably a flea doesn’t appreciate the difference in
personality or spiritual quality between one
juicy arm and another in quite the same way
we do (although they may)
and because horses with wings are rare to the point of
impossible and flying ladders of shiny bronze that
take you to the higher heavens rung by rung
are more an apt metaphor than something you can
pick up at your local hardware store
and because even the highest mountains come at
last to a peak
and the deepest ocean rifts hit bottom after all
then we can begin to appreciate not only the
utterly complete pattern of things but also the
occasional breaks in the pattern as when for
example a building in a forest fire isn’t
burnt to the ground an elephant is
united with a boon companion after more than
thirty years apart in their respective
circuses or zoos and their trunks entwine in loving recognition
or a true cascade of purest love bursts in
cavalcades of purest splendor from seemingly the
marrow of our bones in a hot flood throughout the
entire system showing us the loveliest connections between
mouse and rainbow paper-weight and
train wreck door slam and baby born as the
whole cycle repeats itself in a new key enough to
shiver the deepest sleeper awake and the most
delicate moth to suddenly have the
courage of a tiger in sipping the most
inaccessible nectar
______________________
(from Blood Songs, unpublished)
(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
_________________________________
(from Shaking the Quicksilver Pool, The Ecstatic Exchange)
I was on the freeway to Atlantic City on September 11, 2001, when someone phoned my friend who was driving to tell of the catastrophe. As far as I know I didn’t lose anyone I was acquainted with nor related to. But I was involved in a particularly poignant way with the Mohawk High Steel Workers who both helped build the Trade Center Towers and were now called upon to unravel the metal labyrinths the tragedy left behind.
I was friends with Kamala Cesar who was a member of my Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company in the late 60s in Berkeley, California. She had gone on to a career of traditional study from South Indian Dance Master Balasaraswati, performing and then teaching it, and establishing the studios of Lotus Music & Dance in New York over the forty years since the disbanding of the theater company. One of the teacher-performers at her studio, Jerry “Thundercloud” McDonald, a blood member of the Mohawk Nation (as is Kamala) was deeply impressed by a performance of The Dance Theater of Harlem he had seen, and got the idea to do a similar presentation of an adapted Mohawk Eagle Dance within a modern dance context. Now he needed an overall vision as well as scenario and director of all but the actual dances, so Kamala asked me to come up from Philadelphia to New York to meet him and his wife Tonya Frichner, and see how I might be inspired to get involved.
I arrived at the appointed restaurant, and during lunch learned that Mohawk Indian Jerry was also a High Steel Worker, one of those tiny ant-men walking in the sky along girders on skyscraper construction sites with death-defying grace. He described in detail truly harrowing experiences he and other High Steel workers had had on very narrow steel beams often forty or more stories high, since it was discovered by construction engineers that Mohawk Indians would go where other workers wouldn’t dare. They were able to glide like tightrope walkers on four-inch wide girders, riveting giant steel beams in place by hand-guiding them to their perpendicular frames, often without more than flimsy safety belts, or out in space with nothing at all below them. I could feel the hair standing up on the back of my neck as he described all this. But here was a perfect dance piece: the presentation of a traditional Mohawk Eagle Dance within a scenario of modern dancers interpreting movements of the workers, even using the actual language of gestures with which they communicate instructions from ground to sky, guiding and helping, as well as imitating the teetering balancing and sliding along movements of these brave native athletes.
We interviewed and taped some of the Mohawk workers and more importantly their long-suffering wives and relatives, who openly expressed their often fearful anguish for their men going off to work, constantly praying for their safety. This was now an established family tradition among many Mohawks (as well as others), often comprising all the men in a family, they having found a money-making niche with little competition. (An interesting detail: families with more than one High Steel Worker would not allow them all to go to work at the same time, in case one died, as happened famously at an extension bridge site in Canada early in the century, where all the men of families that had gone to work were wiped out by a single accident.) The resulting tapes were then edited, with repeats of key words and phrases in rhythmic (Steve Reich-like) segments, to make up part of the musical component the modern dancers in overalls and hardhats would dance to. Mohawk Elder Tom Porter would give an opening invocation. The Eagle Dance would be danced by Jerry and his wife Jeannie, in gorgeously white-feathered array, and actual Steel-Workers who were also traditional drummers and singers would accompany them with drumming and singing in the Mohawk language. The modern dancers led by Jaan Freeman were New York’s extraordinarily inventive dancer-choreographers, including one lithe soloist who flew and then caught a huge Malaysian eagle kite I found in a Philadelphia import store and suggested he try incorporating into a dance.
We were meant to premiere the piece on September 22, 2001. It was all arranged, and we were ready. Then came September 11th. The premiere had to be canceled until a later time. I traveled by train up to New York to a meeting on the 15th to decide what to do, and walked the long, shocked street from Penn Station at 8th Avenue to a little studio on 58th Avenue to meet with the cast. The Mohawk steel-workers were at Ground Zero. It turns out that a number of the older workers had helped construct the Twin Towers in the first place, and they were now being called upon to help untangle the wreckage they knew so well, girder by girder, these eagles, these high steel acrobats of courage and daring, our own ravaged indigenous natives building and unbuilding our modern skyscrapers, now in toxic birds’ nests of twisted metal and human carnage, at the hell-center of a tragedy brought about by fanatical hatred fueled by America’s financial and deeply biased and implicated Empire.
Eagle Spirit: A Tribute to Native High Steel Workers was finally presented in New York many months later. Many of the native dancers and singers who performed in the evening, in a darkened theater, with their drums and feathers, had spent their day working in the toxic dust and wreckage at Ground Zero.
___________________________________________________
(original notice)
Eagle Spirit: A Tribute to Native High Steel Workers
This collaboration between Mohawk dancer/ironworker Jerry McDonald, African-American modern dancer Jaan R. Freeman, and the poet Daniel Moore honors the Mohawk high steel workers who have built much of the New York skyline. This work combines Mohawk traditions with contemporary music and dance, bringing together the nimble steps required to walk on swaying beams 500 feet above the pavement with dance that is 1,000 years old. Guest artists include the Mohawk Singers, the Thunderbird Dancers, the Onondaga Nation Smoke Dancers, and the Akwesasne Women Singers. Mohawk Elder Tom Porter will open the program with ironworker stories and traditional teachings of the Longhouse.
A little ramshackle shack on a hill
blown apart by the wind
door roof and walls lofted aloft and sent flying
no weightier than paper upon which is casually written
a name
twists in the air almost signals goodbye then
suddenly is gone only
bare hillside left behind
a goat now stands upon
two goats a small herd after the wind’s died down
straggle along distractedly
chewing
Madame X is led out to the guillotine where a
head once encircled by ermine on a tall neck once
encircled by strings of pearls and glittering diamonds
rolls like a dark pearl into a basket its
eyes rolled heavenward its body relaxed
backward like a flung necklace onto a
marble tabletop in an
empty room after the
ball is over
_____________________________________________________________
(NOTE: At first I had no intention of writing a poem about the event, and was bereft of thoughts
toward any poem, stunned as everyone, with convulsions of feelings. The first part above came as
metaphoric, irrational, that I now see in aspects of our essential transience, ourselves and our
buildings, gone in a flash… the first shock I think we all felt in some way. The great New York
fortress of permanence and wealth, now vanished. Then Madame X, like the nobility of the French
Revolution, summarily executed, justice waived, a sudden blow to the grand ball of American might,
now irrevocably vulnerable. But these hard and emblematic images are not the human story of actual
deaths that day, taken up in Part 2.)
___________________________________________________________________
PART 2
Imagine the precise and daunting gears and
levers of the decree that led to all those innocent
people meeting death at the World Trade Center in
New York September 11, 2001
all the little accumulating gestures and maneuvers that
put them at their desks on schedule in time to die
the horrific fireball of the angel of death who may have
appeared to them all at the last as
cool refreshing waterfalls of light or open
delightful corridors leading to emerald green
gardens so bright with joy they forgot completely
how they got there
We all wonder how we’ll die
hoping for a soft bed in a warmly lit room surrounded by
loved ones after a short and not too uncomfortable
illness a kind of light cough or a
stitch in the side and that’s all
never imagining falling to the ground from 110 stories in the air
or twisted in molten steel like a tyrant’s cage
in suffocating smoke
Unthinkable
The high school diplomas the happy
vacation moments in Cancun across a turquoise pool
the epiphanies while reading Moby Dick
the birthday banquets with long-lost relatives
the recent wedding or long-awaited love letter received
It’s a lone figure in a woolen hat on a sheer white hillside
whose coat trails the ground and whose
footprints evaporate once the meeting’s taken place
It’s unfathomable and beyond any human
words devised to describe it
and for all those souls lost in the New York disaster
whose accidental but destined martyrdom is absolutely assured
(except ironically to the fanatically deluded
hell-bound perpetrators of the unthinkable
disaster itself)
there are coats of eiderdown so soft and pearls so ethereally gorgeous
so filled with subatomic music that pours out of
every gap in their weave to envelop the air in
ecstatic choir
And the divine shadow of Truth moves aside to let pour
a radiance so pure every moment set in motion in time
one step after another year after year that led to their
being there in the right place at the
supreme right time
suddenly becomes a series of perfect stepping stones like floating
lily pads over deep black water to a Paradise even our
most ornate imaginations cannot adequately imagine
___________________________________________________________________
(NOTE: This section is thinking the unthinkable, that those who died that day
were us, in so many ways, but in deeply personal detailed ways, which made it
all the more raw and poignant. This was our American Tragedy, inflicted by a
concatenation of rationales, but suffered wholesale by innocents. But by our
beloved Prophet’s statements, peace of Allah be upon him, such deaths warranting
Paradise, while “ironically” the opposite for such idealogue perpetrators, deluded
that such a Paradise is for them. But Allah knows best.
This morning musing on the enigmatic first part of this poem, I thought about
the goats left in the buildings’ void, and recalled, for the first time all
these years later, the words of the Hadith regarding Signs of the End of Time
that one is “ragged herders of goats vying with each other in building tall
buildings…” or words to that effect.
_____________________________________________________________________________
PART 3
People are very involved with having
faces and eyes and thoughts of their own and
smells in the odorous parts of their
bodies where the human anatomy dictates
They move with a certain self-consciousness which is sometimes
nonchalant and at other times unnatural
they can feel their spines hunched or vertically straight
and how their rib-cages make room for their
breathing
People are curious capsules of atmospheres and internal weathers
and at complete ease are either blessed with expansive
horizons or cursed with tics and foibles that
intensely constrain them
a consciousness that may include the Serengeti for example with
all its wild flora and fauna or the
bleached out and tattered prospect of simply
four walls a ceiling and a floor
Young ones often betray a jumpy and eager quality
old ones a sleepy and generally exhausted quality though they
may achieve beneficence from time to time as their
bones creak and their nerves ache
But each one is categorically a cosmos and has vivid
cosmological thinking and a deep appreciation of its consequences
and each one experiences the end of the
world when death appears like a
yawning sea to drown them in its
perpetuity
drawing back within it the
essence of their beauty
______________________________________________________________________
(NOTE: This third part may seem redundant of the second part, but in retrospect it seems
I may not have felt I’d quite thrown myself inside the people lost with enough empathy,
and have now doubled down, as it were, on our essential humanness, the spirit of humanness.
As Whitman said, “I am a cosmos,” and as Allah in the Qur’an has stated, “if someone kills another person — unless it is in retaliation for someone else or
for causing corruption in the earth — it is as if he had murdered all mankind [5:32],”
and the Sufis say, “Man is a little cosmos, and the cosmos is a big man.”
So this section of the poem is a rhapsody of the innermost reality of each person born,
which we all instinctively know in our own humanity, and can clearly see and know directly
through the vision of our hearts.)
___________________________________________________________________________
PART 4
This is the music space
where music is most difficult
this place of joy and horror
sound of fuselage entering steel as if
slicing through butter
This is the silence out of which
all the thrilling chords emerge
This is the space of the silence of souls
at their moment of release
This is the air over a dewy wheat field
crackling like cellophane in the morning light
This is the music space
voices in a room of those
visible and those who are invisible
I think the music of the spheres
can be heard in this space
It’s the sound of life
which takes place without echo
or is nothing but echo
And the original sound is the
sound of God alone audible to Himself
and we are the humming elements of that sound
This is the music space
we hear it this very moment
It’s the sound of hooves
and nothing at all like the sound of hooves
It’s the endlessly heaving ocean-sound
which turns out to be our blood beating
and the deep tidal push of our own heartbeats
Each whisper of love and fear and grief
rises in this music space
And one single note is enough to fill it
And silence itself is part of it
And the silence or the sound that follows it
is also part of it
_______________________________________________________
9/15-16 (from The Music Space, Ecstatic Exchange, 2007)
(NOTE: I first read this poem in its entirety in public at an event produced by the New York ASMA Society
in Grace Cathedral, January 19, 2002, Reflections at a Time of Transformation.
Faced with the unspeakable, with some people shocked out of their beliefs and others
suddenly unjustly held responsible for having beliefs (and I don’t mean the fanatic ones),
this final part lifts into another realm, a music space, with the first three parts providing
its human foundation, with God willing a sense of His overarching Majesty and Beauty over all.)
