Poem: A Little Mouse in a Hole

A little mouse in a hole in the house
sings to the moon with the

sweetest of squeaks

Crows can only caw but caw they do
as they fly into the sky’s maw then

into trees for their morning Conferences of the Birds
squawking and cawing for all they’re worth

The giraffe it’s said also vocalizes but at
decibels so high or so low (I can’t recall)

humans can’t hear with the naked ear

Stars also sing in perfect
pitch though of strange keys

and peculiar harmonies you’d maybe
have to be in a front row seat among star debris

to correctly hear
and then you might find angels and

space-demons also leaning in to listen

Light and sound and space and the
creatures who dwell therein…

What a thrilling ensemble we all are
singing to our deity in the

best harmony hoping to be heard the way
we’ve been created to sound

in light and space
while we go through our

paces
______________________________
9/25/09 (from The Throne Perpendicular to All that is Horizontal – in progress)

Poem: New Moon

How strange that it’s all based on the sighting
of the slightest
sliver of the moon!
The whole sky veils it then, only the
curved edge, like the
rim of a silver glass, can be
barely seen, yet it

signals the
beginning and
end of the Fast!

We go out looking for it, but what we’re
looking for is only a
thin rind of light, no big

structure of stars or full-moon’s totally
visible target, nor yet the

biliously glowing fireball of the
sun, but only the
hair-curve of that
dead reflective body, magnetic
mirror companion to earth, pocked
corpse of weird desolation, to us

brilliant Klieg when bulbous, but such a

spectral delicacy when new, so

furtive in so much
sundown (where it usually

is at the
start and
end of each
lunar month), and it is this

subtlety we are commanded to
seek, this beautiful
uncertainty, known for sure really

only by God, that

signals to us

as clear a renunciation of
earth-life as death is, as

clear a reflection of our sliver-thin

mortality as not
eating is, so that our

days are made more
transparent on earth, so that we

too are made

more transparent.
____________________________
(from Ramadan Sonnets, The Ecstatic Exchange)

2 Poems from 25th Ramadan (from Ramadan Sonnets)

AFTER AFTERNOON NAP

1

Awakening from finally a Sunday afternoon nap
having a hard time actually getting up, from
weakness? From being an
empty lead weight? From mental
inertia at not being able to go
right into the kitchen and grab a cookie, or have the
institutional cup of tea set out in one of the
china cups with blue flower rims, honey and milk on a
round silver tray, the Sunday afternoon
pick-me-up (the actually
everyday afternoon pick-me-up) totally

gone out the window during this whole month of
cutting the food umbilical, weaning from
Earth as Mother, Life as Tit, for just one

month out of the year, every year of our
life, until we get
good at it? Or
die?

One month being castaway on a
desert island from dawn to sunset
with no refrigerator?

A band of deprivation running through our year!
And that band has
entranceways to the Garden, actual
Gates open in the
Unseen for us for all the

fasting we have done, cheerfully or
grumpily, but
submissively, a Gate that
engulfs us during our

doing without, so that its

sparkling energy of openness

actually surrounds us in the

air as we

forgo the pounding

demands of our stomachs and

titillating appetites on the

lunch counter of day, like a

drunk’s fist insistent on the

greasy Formica of some

downtown Sloppy Joe’s.

2

The beginning of the Fast is a mercy.
The middle a forgiveness of sins.
The end, freedom from the Fire.

No one said it was supposed to be easy.
No one said it had to be
enjoyable. (I’m from California!
Everything’s supposed to be
enjoyable!)

The coal miner’s face as he
goes down in the cage with the
other miners, sons and
grandsons of miners, maybe
born coal-blackened, is not the face of someone
enjoying himself, but he knows one

truth in the total array of this creation, and that one
is all-embracing in its
human implications, and it is the

grimness of one side of our life, like the
side of the moon no
light ever touches, pitted and
scarred, and it is

not all of life, but it is the
bleakness of hardship, it is the

sore muscles and short breath of human exertion,
this band of the fast that
imposes itself like iron through the lighter
fabric of our life, and shows us a

truth, and I

have to endure it, and there is

reward for enduring it, almost

palpable during enduring it,

uphill or not, as in the

uphill exertion of actually

getting up from my nap, pulling my

trousers on and waiting another

hour to break the fast.

Not easy or fun
working all week, through the day,
bicycling home to lie down for an
hour in a kind of
body-wrack trance, then somehow

get up, until the

sunset breaks it all with that

first taste of date, that

first sip of water,

that first physical taste of the

Garden on the tongue, the strange but

total sense of well-being and the

simple surge of energy that

goes through the body from just eating

and unclenches the mind and gives it light,
and makes everything

have more light around it, and

be less grim.

3

By day we side with unfortunates –
stark landscapes, the vast
geometric
distances between stars.

By night we are laughing at the
feet of the Bacchanal, rolling in
pink velvet, eating
grapes off their stems until their
wetness glistens our
beards and chins.

Gratitude releases us from the Fire.
Habits are a mercy.
Hardship is having to face
obligation that
goes against the
grain.

After a moment of drought –

rain!

25 Ramadan
_____________________________

GOD’S GARDEN GATE

By day we side with the unfortunate,
those who have little, and it makes us live
in a stark landscape, our energy spent
doing small things, and we give

up small comforts, existing in the wide spaces
between stars, in a geometry of light.
Grim during the day, color comes into our faces
when we enter the gentle Bacchanal of night.

Then creation’s natural feast lets loose its floods
which circulate in streams in the body’s beds,
day’s darker starkness enters brighter moods.
Our hearts are open, brightness frees our heads.

There is a tightness in fasting that makes us wait
in daily patience at God’s Garden Gate.

25 Ramadan

Ramadan Sonnet: Town

for Abdallateef Whiteman, village architect

An adobe wall, dust by dust, is built up
to surround the town.
A trail enters it from
desolate and wild surroundings.
A cut-off from the unpredictable and
unkempt in nature is made, a
boundary.

The town is constructed, brick by humanly
molded, hand-packed mud brick,
making house-walls, rooms, wood windows,
doors, then roof-beams, tiles to
catch and let rain
run off to the
newly formed cobbled streets. Then

lights go on in the houses. Passing from
room to room. At the
domestic centers: multiple radiance.

Winding lanes lead in jagged labyrinthine ways
to the center, past
bow-legged pillars of the
marketplace, selling-stalls under
provisional roofs,
concatenation of courtyards, rushing

to the central square, where an even
stronger light is displayed. And when

we arrive
there is nothing. At the

heart of the town is an
openness, so
tasty and
sensual as to be almost a

thing. Bright air. Intangible, unnamable, but a

definite apprehension. And there is
light there.

Such is the
self. Such is the

Fast.

19 Ramadan (night)

New Ramadan Poem

MIDNIGHT PING-PONG MATCH

A midnight ping-pong match
is playing among the stars

Atoms careen through space smacked by
invisible paddles

The shadow of the Player Who plays both
sides leans over our hearts

The tick-tock sound of the ping-pong balls
can be heard in our ears among the

singsong of speech and in the
soft darkness of silken silences

But the shadow in our hearts
peers deep inside our souls

and finds inside the same space as the
outer space it finds in space

8/25/09

An amazing visual adventure…

My friend, Hakim Archuletta, with whom I became Muslim in 1970, sent this on to me today, and it is truly mesmerizing… (a little Ramadan gift)

Poems from Ramadan Sonnets

(With prayers that everyone on earth benefit from this year’s Ramadan Fast, far and wide, high and low, and that the blessings become an ocean that touches everyone’s hearts.

I’ll be posting poems from time to time during the month from my book, Ramadan Sonnets, written each Ramadan day in 1986, insha’Allah.

And with news soon of a new book just out, Sparrow on the Prophet’s Tomb, available now…)

______________________

THE INEVITABLE

It’s like practicing for death. No food or drink
during daylight hours no matter
what, in the
heat of summer or
cold of winter,
and no way out of it but through

sickness, pregnancy, menstruation, madness or travel.

So that
it’s something that comes
inevitably each year, like it or not, whether or not
you’ve got a knack for it, and
some do, and love to fast, and
thrive on it, but
I do not, yet

each year it makes its visit, and year after
year it builds up to be a
sweet thing,

which makes it like death, the way it’s
always on the
horizon, and an
absolute obligation, which must be

why Muslims often die well. They’ve had a
lifetime of Ramadans tenderizing them
for The Inevitable. And The

Inevitable surely comes.

1 Ramadan

_____________________

HEADACHE

Headache, the invalid feeling of being sickly and having to
take it easy, testiness when
things don’t go quite
right, annoyance of magnetic
gravity, things
fall in a pile or
slide off an incline – not the

hunger alone that binds us in brotherhood ultimately with
hollow-eyed Ethiopians of
this and all other eras,
but the frailty, the passing alone down the
alien corridors of this world that is such a
poignant reminder to us, so that in our
momentary physiological grayness

when the food finally comes showering at the
end of the fast and turns all things back to
Technicolor again, and we feel
the old soft-shoe lightness in our step again and the
old brightness in our smile,

the cornucopia dome of the sky turned
earthward again, the arid stretch
suddenly fertile, fruits and
flowers as if by
cinematic magic fill our
perceptions, the
floodgate of generosity opened to the
full, then our

body-bound, sense-imprisoned
selves expand past identity with one
hollow-pitted stomach dusty in the
hot rays of a pitiless sun
to a non-entity whose single characteristic is

gratitude and whose
every pulse is animated by the

Single Provider of all this
and every life’s

provision.

2 Ramadan

Poem: Fifteenth Night of Shabaan

A ball of mercury
slides down an incline into a pool

reflecting all the starry heavens
making a whispery inaudible splash

A planet dislodges from its orbit and
wobbles out of tune with its

moons and asteroids following suit
and for a millennia or two a tiny

corner of the universe is in
disarray shivering in disquietude

unfelt by all earthly beings except perhaps
the poisonous tree frog

In a corner of our world
behind a broken sun-baked adobe wall

an extraordinary baby is born
whose exemplary life will inspire

even the plants to grow more generously
and in more profuse abundance

actually felt by a distant galaxy
that to us is just a number with

no name though the baby’s name
indicates an infinite number of Grace

(not the baby Jesus peace be upon him
but a contemporary saintly one

known by only a handful as a
paragon of purity who

lives his entire lifetime for
everyone but himself)

on this night O God Your granting forgiveness
for all mistakes big and small

I’ve inflicted on myself and others
now and forevermore

hoping expectantly for absolution by You and
by everyone whose failings of mine have caused harm

as the mercury sphere descends into its
shimmering original element

and distant-most stars audibly
twinkle in this nearest-most cardiac

element of light

8/7/2009

Poem: Great Boat

We live in the hold of a great boat
moving through the stars

There are no windows in this boat
and it is all window

The rudder’s held fast by a
force we can’t imagine

The bow’s pointed to a
place we’ll never know

The high sea and the high air
we breathe are all the same

It is night and navigation is by
celestial lights

There’s nothing of earth on this
boat but a few medicinal plants

It may be Noah’s Ark with its
genetic doubles

Can you feel it gently rocking?
It’s never still

Out the window that is not a window
are the woods the unearthly woods

The deep darkness of the woods
is the deep darkness of the heavens

Our hearts are solar flares
born in the deep darkness

It is not silent here
and the waves are song

A face where the moon should be
looks down and smiles

The whole cosmological realm
is like this smile

The boat is moving in all directions
and goes nowhere

Everyone we will ever love
is on this boat

Where have you heard of this boat before
if not in your heart?

It never lands because
there’s never land in sight

God’s motions are its motions
and His will its way

Finally we can say
it’s all a matter of starlight

Homelessness is its home
and its watery shelter

The Captain never sleeps
in His Divine Absence

If His Presence were any more Present
it would shatter us

The window that we look out
is the window that we see

What we see is the
window we look through to see it

It’s not ours
but God’s alone

Who owns it

_________________
8/4/2009 (from Stretched Out on Amethysts, in progress)

Video poem: Timetable 1

from SPARROW ON THE PROPHET’S TOMB

TIMETABLE 1

All the historical pantomimes
that spelled out subtitles in fractured rhymes
under the movie that unrolled forwards or backwards
were resolved in a blink by the spark of the falling swords
as they clanged into the tree-trunk at the end of time
to signal the cut-off point of the nonsensical pantomime.

A large round table in a large square hall
where men in uniforms stood before their fall
and unrolled a map of the world laid flat
and passed a pencil from one hand – fat
and pudgy with excess of pork in their diet –
to another to draw outlines in a universal riot
of borders and frontiers and nationalities crazed,
then shook hands and sniffed importantly,
leaving the peasantry dazed
for decades in hemmed-in contraptions of death
that counted off heartbeats and charged rent for each breath.

Kaisers and kings and presidents and führers,
shoulder to shoulder under portraits of ancestors
in a chandeliered hall in Vienna, Austria,
an old world country with shelves full of china
and invisible cobwebs behind beer-mugs and plates,
and visible dust on the map of new states
as they left the table to the drawing-room cigar
as flames caught its edges and began the scar
that ran its wound through the human heart
separating mankind into one cubby-holed part
next to another, like several square pigeon-coops set on the globe
as it turns slowly eastward in its cloud-lined robe.

The life of this world
is just a series of skeletons dancing in the dark.

The life of this world
is a series of skeleton keys opening different doors.

_______________________________________

THE FEW WITH ELEGANT MANNERS

The few with elegant manners came as if alighting from horses,
they stepped down and gathered folds of radiance around them
as their feet hit the ground which showed no footprint below them
for it was not solid ground beneath them
— the footprints in dirt were for those
who saw it as gross and solid beneath them —
they went on, straight-backed, to their places
and stood patiently waiting, but their waiting was bird-flight,
wings in the wind, all the flurry of wing-tips that ever
flew in the world down below
fanned now in the air of their waiting.

Their faces were moons assembled on cloudless horizons,
their eyelids were shields drawn down over inward gazes,
their hands rested at their sides, relaxed and pulsing,

no terror shook them, as promised,
no last-minute griefs or regrets,
no sudden anxieties to go back to do something differently.

They cast no shadows as the sun bore down upon them,
shaded by the Throne that stood
immaterially before them.

These were the Chosen Ones

Video & Poem: from The Chronicles of Akhira

THEY CAME DOWN FROM THE HIGH AND LOW PLACES,
they threaded themselves along
through the intricate threadings,
the ancient ones and the new ones,
all the famous were among them,
all the shining stars,
all the historical glory-grabbers, the great thieves,
all the inventors with their psychological quirks,
the nobodies came as well, the flowing multitudes of the anonymous,
the endless dissatisfied housewives, authoritative bureaucrats,
gas-station attendants and couples with no children,
philanthropists and the workaholics,

they came through the sandy pass,
faces were indistinguishable, differences unnoticed,
naked they came and assembled,
fear for their own state kept their eyes on the ground,

they came and made ranks,
the noble and notable next to the hardened criminal,
the saint in his glow next to the shrew in her darkness,
all the Chinese came, all the Australian Aborigines,
some who had never been clothed came,
and some who had never been out of them,

important socialites were bereft of their diamonds,
the scholar with references bereft of his briefcase,
the policeman with his beer-belly pitched on his heels,
the priest with his miter now gone, lost in a haze,

well-known faces recognized in the earthly crowd
were lost in the mass now, shaded by the one standing next to it,

no Rolls-Royce stood ready for the king,
his feet made dust-prints with the rest,
no helicopter hovered to take the millionaire away,
he felt the weight of his reconstituted body now with the rest,

as they awaited the setting-up of the scales,
as humanity assembled on the plain under a blinding sun
and awaited the judgment to fall

that would decide each one’s place.

Even the sainted were afraid, the ones whose hearts
glowed like a sunrise
through the transparency of their rib-cages,
even they were covered in sweat to their eyebrows,
the camel-drivers of the edge,
the caravan-leaders at the margins of the earth,
the destitute, delicate, daring hearts who
stayed up nights calling out in hope
and spiritual derangement,

they took their places in this place of no-place
and awaited the click that would tell all,
the sinking or rising of the pan
with the light or heavy scales registering
the forever of their moments
lengthened out now along a line

visible from the beginning to the end of each life
like a straight narrative, or a string with knots in it.

No flaws in the universe,
and the universal memory has no lapses.

Each dwarf or giant of sensibility and care
came to the jamboree

at the beginning of Eternity
and wondered in its echoes

what its final fate would be.

Poem: The Lover the Beloved

The lover lowers her gaze and the Beloved
raises it

until lover is engulfed in oceans too vast to
circumscribe

and around their margins fly continuous bands of
singing birds

The lover closes her lips around silence the way
light enters a room and obliterates darkness

and the Beloved suddenly starts singing inside the
lover’s mouth until even the stars like wandering animals
in their constellational shifts bleat and bay across
vast astronomical distances making them as small

as the moisture bead on the lover’s lip and the
Beloved’s eye-gleam from as far away as
deep undersea

The lover stands to embrace the Beloved
and the Beloved stands to embrace the lover

And the lover stands to embrace the Beloved
and the Beloved stands to embrace the lover

and the echoes from their movements blow rainbow
lights stuttering against earth’s canyon walls and icebergs
break off and slide into black waters

And the Beloved stands and the lover
shrinks within the microscopic compass of all her
insignificant acts until each breath
obliterates her
and the Beloved stands to embrace the lover
until the whole world rises to a standing position within that embrace

An Ant gnaws at a redwood tree and it
falls in a straw across a single heartbeat

We’ve never left God’s glorious dimension and need only look

not within us nor around us
but through the sphere of that Glance the Beloved takes and
blows into a ball of sky and crashing waves

which is all the lover offers through the paucity of
her multifaceted “I”

The singular embrace
__________________________________
4/2/2005 (from Holiday from the Perfect Crime)

Poem: Videoku #2 Pray Afghanistan…

A late-night videoku, extemporized before hitting the video button (I will confess), but only a moment before… and responding, May 7, 2009, to sad, gathering clouds… done

Pray Afghanistan
be allowed to breathe easy
among the living

Poem: Videoku #1

Video’d haiku in the moment of its making… with one false start…

Haiku: 5/7/5 syllables,
a momentary noticing, a flash, succinct, over in an instant.

Here in its raw freshness… inside on a rainy day.

(Actually, in the moment, I miscounted, and “washing machine noise surging” is actually 7 syllables after all, but I prefer the second try, without a repeat of the word “noise.”  Though I do like the word “surging” there with its present-day ovetones… )

Why be a stickler for the 5/7/5 form, when poets today, in Japanese as well as English, often catch the Haiku spirit of momentary noticing with even one or two lines, and disregard the exact syllable count?  Perhaps it’s both a challenge to me and a little respite from my usual Open Form poetics… otherwise, hey, one may do as one wishes…

done

The house is noisy –
washing machine, dryer… ah!
Outside, the gray sky –

Poem: Bird Song / & Olivier Messiaen

I’ve been preparing another book for publication, this one from 1988, called The Perfect Orchestra (whose title poem sees all of creation as “the perfect orchestra,” waterfalls, traffic noise, etc… all God’s creation lending their instruments to the total sound…

And came across this poem to the music of Olivier Messiaen, my favorite 20th century composer, a true mystic, who actually envisioned being among the angels, often by putting actual bird song from the entire world’s populations of birds, into his music (as the poem mentions).  This video clip from YouTube has him playing the organ, a little improvised piece (so it says) which sounds like it is based on a birdsong motif.  He was a major cathedral organist while still in his teens…

In the 60s in Berkeley I attended a concert with him in person, and because of the overflow crowd, was seated on the stage, actually behind him at the piano, about five yards away.  He was much older than in this clip, hair wispy, and he had on one of his signature florid bright-colored shirts with the pointed collars outside his jacket.  I’d first heard of him from a Life Magazine article showing him in the country, with sheet music and pen, notating birdsong… his beret on… and it fascinated me.  That we should all be so situated in the world, to be able to hear and make use of God’s direct manifestations…

BIRD SONG

I envy Olivier Messiaen
stalking early mornings in the
fields of France, in a
magazine article I saw
years ago, with a

notebook, notating

bird song!

He is said to be able to orchestrate birdcalls
just by hearing them, write those
trills and
watery runs with

tiny black dots on lines a musician back in a
musty room might play on his clarinet!

Notes, out of
tree-wilderness, out of
bird language, one to
another for
whatever reason, bodily
companionship, territorial
rights, mating calls, thrills of
pleasure in the plumage, beak

gabble, sunlight
delirium, a bird’s sense of
entertainment, some
floating on updrafts,

whatever reasons God gives them for responding the
way God’s made them
respond over a

silken wheat field at
first slants of
dawn, gold

light along
dew blankets,

the world waking
up, birds
registering the
waking,

Messiaen with his
stubby pencil attached like a

seismograph to the knowledge of his
ear making

dots with or without little
black flags attached someone

back in a room can play on his
clarinet, or a

whole

orchestra, celestas, flutes, hitting those

high note-clusters, enraptured –

for no reason!

___________________

3/30/88 (from The Perfect Orchestra, in preparation)

Poem (video + text) A Breath of Fresh Air

A BREATH OF FRESH AIR

A breath of fresh air
sailed over the highest mountain peak and
down into the valley enjoying its
nonchalant pace over grassy plains as
green as unripe apples and the

breath of fresh air turned with the prevailing
current through a massive gorge and
just above a river where tumultuous waters as they
hurled over rocks resembled storm clouds though no
storm was brewing and the

breath of fresh air saw a city ahead and
pulled itself tighter though no less fresh
as it looped in a little air-pocket for a
short while which slowed its pace and
gave it some rest so that when it

began again toward the city it was going at a
much more leisurely rate and could really
take its time over outlying fields and across
meandering herds of sheep and goats that never even
looked up to see the fresh breath of air pass overhead

and the breath of fresh air descended slowly as it
passed the first thatched cottages dotted almost
haphazardly along the hills and it
skimmed along their brown roofs and lifted a
little as it headed toward a more concentrated
cluster of buildings and streets and now some
converging streets down below and traffic and even
noise like its memory of ocean surf

and the breath of fresh air pulled itself more
tightly together over children’s playgrounds and
a group of people sitting and eating under a
tree which the breath of fresh air slowly
circulated around admiring the massive
trunk filtering past each shapely leaf

and the breath of fresh air from the icy peak in the
far distance over the horizon finally sailed through an
open window in a tallish building with
green shutters where a sweet maiden was
sitting at a computer growing drowsy after a
long morning typing statistics

and as she turned her head and yawned
the breath of fresh air sailed happily into her
mouth and down her throat into her
filigreed lungs and she didn’t know why exactly
maybe it was the mystery of yawning
but she suddenly felt
uncannily refreshed

and her topaz colored eyes glittered for a
moment almost seeing the last few
rivering miles of movement the

breath of fresh air had taken to its
momentary dark destination in her blood
_______________________________
4/8/2002 (from Where Death Goes)

Poem: I’m More Concerned

(Note: I’ve been editing a book of poems  called Shaking the Quicksilver Pool, and came across this poem written in February of 2000, and it resonates with the present real and illusorily psychic flood or earthquake or tsunami that is shaking us in so many ways, with old Father Noah invoked, navigating his way to the dove who doesn’t return to his arm. May we also all see our way to dove’s light, no matter what.)

I’M MORE CONCERNED

I’m more concerned
I’m more concerned he said
of how these next few years
these next few years will affect the small and

perishable things that dare to poke their
poke their heads up through the
permafrost that confronts us all that
confronts the big and small as we

battle against the very inertia that drowned
the unconcerned of Noah’s time of the very old
time of Noah who very
successfully unsuccessfully built the

boat but failed to save his
people who were too busy being unimaginative though all
though all the signs were there for them
to see

the small and brave of us as well as the
big and strong

facing the wall of water
the mile-high wall of water that’s just now on the
brink of cresting and rushing down with all its

absolutely every ounce of its impact wondering what
hit us
as if the earth itself were raised like a
wrecking ball and swung against itself

shattering the continents and splashing the
seas into space like a dog shaking itself

like a dog bounding onto the shore from a cascading
rush of water and
shaking itself dry
_________________
2/16/2000 (from Shaking the Quicksilver Pool, out soon by The Ecstatic Exchange)

Poem: Light of the Shadowless One

(Note: This is a poem for the Mawlid, honoring the Prophet Muhammad’s birth. In devotional poetry the honorific, “peace of Allah be upon him,” is assumed. There is another from this Mouloud collection posted on my website: www.danielmoorepoetry.com)
________________________________________

LIGHT OF THE SHADOWLESS ONE

When an object casts no shadow, what does it mean?
That its light is over all other lights
and no light can
come from any direction
and be stronger, cutting silhouette
outlines of form and laying them out
on a ground into which
all forms must go at last?
But Muhammad was such a one.
They said
he cast no shadow.

O Muhammad!
How can we find you here among the ruins?
How can we see you?

The catalog of his attributes can start from
anywhere and continue forever…
the way he parted his hair, the way he
greeted the poor and fed them.
He once filled a valley between two mountains with
the sheep of God’s bounty, until a
hardhearted bedouin who could only see sheep
had the eyes of his greed put out by the
dazzle of such generosity,
and he turned from
being greedy for world to being
ecstatic affirmer of God
carried away on the backs of fleece
soft as the hair of angels.

O Muhammad!
How can we find you here among the ruins?
How can we see you?

One man, longing to see you, nearly fell out of a date palm
when he heard you had come.
He had gone from teacher to teacher, each one
telling of your impending arrival.
Sweet date meat of a man, the lightningbolt of your
presence struck
and threw him down while collecting dates,
for his longing by then
had matured the meat of his
innermost sweetness, and his
pure heart
saw you at once!

O Muhammad!
How can we find you here among the ruins?
How can we see you?

Or is it that we’re not in ruins enough?
Is it that our fortified walls
have not yet toppled down?
That the glass we erect to see through and think
is so limpidly clear
is in fact
the opaque screen of our selves set up
for the magic lantern to throw its image on
with an illusion of movement and
the assumption of purest transparency?
But are we still too coarse, too thick, not
subtle enough in this

haggard age with its tapeloop rumors of
war?
The absolute nuclear outbreath
that deflates the entire material
system down to the last
particle, even this still
too dense, too
cartoon to contain
the spiritual emptiness needed in us to let
your pure Muhammadan
nature show clear?

O Muhammad!
How can we find you here among the ruins?
How can we see you?

The maddest love for the biggest diamond
is nothing compared to the
love your companions had for you –
they saw your truth was true,
your step sure, your word an opening into
God’s domain,
and one man spat out the grapes he was eating
and took the sword you offered
when he heard you say
that whoever took it and plied it
until he was killed in the way of Allah
would gain the Gates of the Garden, and enter it –
no doubt troubled him, no shadow cast
from your presence, only light –
so what is this
heartbeat one thousand four hundred years later
full of love for you
by people who never saw you

walking like a shadowless
mountain among them?

O Muhammad!
How can we find you here among the ruins?
How can we see you?

Your compassion for an ant trail, a thief, a wretched man
with one piece of rope in his household
and no other possession!
Take that rope, you said, and gather firewood which you can
tie with that rope
and sell it in the market. Then with the
money you earn buy more rope which means you can make
more bundles of firewood
and be on the increase, O always be on the
increase! –
the flow of creation which goes with the flow of
galactic billowing, opening its
giant petalled corolla
through eternal darkness,
our galaxy itself floating through space
like a flower opening,
constantly on the
increase!

O Muhammad!
How can we find you here among the ruins?
How can we see you?

Our galaxy opens its rose-like corolla of light
out through endless darkness,

and sight itself is
stunned when it

sights your sun!

O Light of Muhammad,
O shadowless one!

(from Mouloud, 1984)

Video Poem/Embedded in the Velvet is the Thorn

EMBEDDED IN THE VELVET IS THE THORN

Embedded in the velvet is the thorn
and at the tip of the thorn choirs

When you take off your face and sit down
something happens to sunlight bright silver envies

I have never been here before though the doors on the
corridor are locked I can
see right through them to the
multi-colored horses standing behind each one

Here’s where the harmonicas go
no identifiable tune only the reedy texture of their sound

God left the way to Him open to even the
faint of heart
a shepherd lost in the fog with his twenty goats walking in
circles or the elevator operator in gray jacket and hat
in the same building for twenty years
up and down

I’d count the number of streaks tears make down cheeks
from eyes brimming over at almost nothing at all
a memory suddenly spotlit among the tightly-squeezed
coats and trousers of an incident thought lost forever
among the shapeless sand dunes of time oh ho!

Look at where the city casts a shadow on the sky
from all the lights day and night
each comment across a table capable of illumination or not
and if not nothing’s changed
and if so some of those horses behind those
locked doors whinny and paw the ground

There’s a lion in the deep jungle who wears a
papier mâché mask of a really ferocious beast
but who only wants to be loved
belied of course by the length of his claws and the
sharpness of his teeth
and the burp after supper that sounds like “goat”

Samson didn’t test the pillars first he just
went ahead and pushed
and the entire temple celebrated critical mass

I’ve never been here before but I’m going to be
sorry to leave if
leave I must

Those zebras and those black and white stripes over there
which came first the event or the
explanation?

Nothing’s happening here that a good merry-go-round at
triple speed couldn’t fix

Nothing gets in the way but the things we’ve set up ourselves
brightly colored cutouts carefully nailed to the floor with the
photographs of friends and relatives friends and foes for
faces

their real heads just bobbing above the horizon but never quite
peering over

Nothing quite feels right just before the end of the world
and then the lights go on and the place fills up again
with the sweet murmur of excited souls

If you think getting born is bad try dying!

Afraid of Dying sat down with No Fear and tried having a
conversation but ended up sharing a
neon sandwich

I think the time has come to say goodbye to these
popped-up sentences
it’s past their bed time

And I have nowhere to go I must go to

With a song in my heart and a
shine on my shoes
and a fresh handkerchief jammed in my
breast pocket

Let go of the rope and you never know what’ll happen
but give it a tug and a campanile bell might ring
or a mountain climber hoist you up to
new heights

I wonder if it’s later in Timbouctou or if the
sun is shining and
what’s happening to the worm-eaten manuscripts in all those
dust-laden libraries no one’s read for a
hundred years or more

Ink be my mariner tonight across the open sea
the sound of pen scratching on paper a faint heartbeat on the
Way to God

and God said it’s worth far more than the
sword
and twice as sharp

See how these worlds are revealed as it
passes on leaving its
reality trails behind these
tumbling sentences like acrobats in His
happy circus?

I want a rose right now to disappear into
forever

Shout to me from your distance

Whisper from your nearness

Listen with your eyes coming to flower

Nowhere’s coming this way
and no one’s there

5/2/2003 (from Psalms for the Brokenhearted)