Poem: No Second Face

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)

Poem: As If a Windsock

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)

Poem: The Magnitude

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)

Poem: Siren at Night

Why is it a siren at night sounds like
someone crying for help

or else despairing of help?

Why is it the city at night is like a
single person with disturbed sleep

generally peaceful but now and then
thrashing from side to side

and yelling out
under the imponderable stars?

Tonight perhaps one person in this entire city’s made the
permanent breakthrough into an undying

spectacular radiance that would
light up any number of national

wonders like the Grand Tetons or even
New York itself

yet no one might know of it
but his caged bird or his

insouciant cat
curled up asleep under the chair of epiphany

in the roofless room of the
Divine Presence

whose doors and windows have
exploded with light

Now there’s another siren across town
speeding to its dutiful appointment

and I pray for safe outcome
surrounded by voices of

sweet council and high jubilation
and the newly ascended saintly one might also

be hearing it with me and be
flying to the scene in the Unseen

to see by God’s pure Seeing
what should be done

and by no action of his own

doing it
__________________________
1/1/11 (from The Caged Bear Spies the Angel, Ecstatic Exchange, 2011)