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)

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)

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)

ENTER ME INTO THE GREAT ADVENTURE

1

Enter me into the great adventure

Don’t let the Tygers of Wrath
pounce at the inception but

lurk at the sidelines behind
banana leaves the size of continents

waving in a wind as great as an
eyelash blink that fans the

cosmic spaces

Each step a plunder of the invisible
each departure a leaving of treasure behind

for the inestimable treasure ahead
Pearl of Great Price

haunted already by what we’ve
never seen

carrying the shadow that will be
cast down at the

death of our minor being to the

allowance through its empty gateway of Your
greater Light

O Thee to Whom we turn without
turning but Who by true turning we would

return to Thee

2

The train left off all its passengers
and went on by itself

The fire consumed the village mountainside
and then consumed itself

The sky beamed down above the lake
then gazed a long time at itself

Eagles hovered for a while in the air
then flew within themselves with giant

wing-flaps toward the heavenly light
that shone only for itself

We stand up for a time then
lie down in ourselves without leaving or

not leaving behind the list of our
duties to be fulfilled by everyone but

ourselves

The day pulls itself over itself and
reveals stars beaming by themselves

though space that is
itself

where nothing but itself exists
to contemplate itself

3

How honest can we be
when everything’s melting instantly?

We contemplate our features in a glass
and it too melts away into the past

The river washes all its suds around our feet
whose every crescent of its ripples can’t repeat

The sun bends down upon our bending forms
whose only beckoning comes from earthworms

The sky fills with incredulous white light
that convinces us that everything’s all right

and it is in every cranny of our lives
where zebras leap and honeybees keep hives

where lions snooze with muzzles on their paws
and everything’s fulfilled by its own laws

created by the Lawgiver Supreme
whose proof exists in a single eyebeam

cast on the melting world before it melts
and leaves behind the mystery of its wealth

where nothing else is at all by God
whose nothing else was Him all along

revealed

4

He is He

and none other is He

but He

And He is

everything
_______________________________
11/14/11 (from The Match That Became a Conflagration)

1

The world went away on a hunting trip
and left us alone in the

long and short corridors and sudden
staircases ascending heavenly levels

A gray light entered around us with
whispering tread and a soft

electrical energy whose crackle was a
new language to our ears but whose

words seemed to emanate from our
hearts

There were no edges or slopes no
ledges or shale cliffs no

entrances or exits all simply
spacelessly spacious and

timelessly timeless in a
placeless place whose

air was our selves obliterated
and whose Presence was

Allah

2

What kind of rose speaks to us out of the
grave of our selves?

What eyes look into our eyes
in the new place?

What road are we on when
all roads are gone?

If the truth speaks through us would
birds scatter from the trees?

How do we refer to this or that when the
self is obliterated

or is there a this or that instead of simply
one This and for all else the

same rose multiply
multiplied?

The beauty of a horse assuages the pain of
separation

The glistening gait of a horse
dissolves separation

The ecstatic gallop of a horse through
light after light brings

unity and separation both
into this place at last

and no rose blooms that isn’t
the golden rose of a nothingness

that brings us face to face with the
rose of His Face

unveiled

3

I awake from a deep sleep into a
deep sleep

I could be aboard a windy galleon
tilting dangerously in a

thunderous sea

but I’m in Philadelphia in the same
room I went to sleep in

The same glow of a lamp overhead
keeping vigil above me

and any angels who might be near

whose world is this world as well as
the unseen

intersectioned by our visionary treks in
sleep or in waking states

opening doors and
entering rooms in which

the Prophet Muhammad God’s
peace be upon him might be

sitting surrounded by his
Companions

in the same glow of a
lamp keeping vigil above them

and he might just look up as we
enter and his soft strong eyes

lock for a moment with ours and
burn everything away that isn’t

Allah in that sweet
incendiary instant
_________________________________
10/28/11
(from The Match That Became a Conflagration, in progress)

(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

_________________________________
(from Shaking the Quicksilver Pool, The Ecstatic Exchange)

Jerry “Thundercloud” McDonald and Tonya Frichner

9/11 MOHAWK EAGLE DANCE MEMOIR

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

PART 1

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.)

A sandwich at noon is enough to
frighten a field of crows

A telephone ringing in an empty room is
answered by the wind

A road leading upward has a
bicycle on it and two trees

When the blessings were brought in
the sun rolled to a stop

Going past the stables all the black horses
flared their nostrils at once

The month of light was sealed and sent to its
Divine Recipient the year we

lived in trees and
sang at dawn

There’s a stubbornness in refusing to flow
out the gate onto the fresh fields of

clover and recently turned pasturage

The celebration began when the moon
turned into a table set with

silver utensils and Samarkand oranges

Rainbows seemed to fill every window
from multiple light sources

The room spun around while we
remained still but it never went

faster than the earth’s rotation
and the spiralling stars

Young girl acrobats stood on
each other’s shoulders almost reaching

the moon

Daylight fills every corner and awakens
the mouse family

Grandpa told this in story form and it
all cohered

But today is another day and the
dolphins have all departed

back to their pods

Does the earth revolve toward us or
away from us?

Does the sky pass behind us
or ahead of us?

Take a step in any direction
and you’re home

where the celebration continues
until dawn though the

rooster may not crow it open
flopping his red crown

I’ve covered a lot of ground sitting here
and don’t intend to correct it

I try not to be out with my sheep
when God visits my hovel

but the north side of the mountain gets chilled
before a fire can be properly stoked

I hear a buzz of words in the air
mixed with a buzz of insects and the

usual high frequency buzz in my ears
I take as celestial music

Deciphering is all we do and we do it
best in our sleep

I greet anyone intrepid enough to speak
and anyone foolhardy enough to listen

It’s over now
The dawn is up

A new day’s begun
_________________
8/30
30 Ramadan (Eid Mubarak!)

Ah coy crescent hiding in a blush of sky
so many want to see you and

hold you to our hearts
each in our own perimeters however

spread across the earth all searching
for your quick eyeblink that promises

untold bounteous rewards for our
month of doing without in

obedience to first sighting you nearly
hidden as always in your rosy cheek of clouds

What a miracle! That there could be
only one of you when so many

hearts have mirrors extended skyward to reflect your
silvery light asliver with such slight

shiveriness and so soon
gone again below the curve of our brows

And why not many crescents in God’s
Generous Splendor that not each

statue of us stand stock still on the

exact same spot of day but each of your
lovers has your breath upon our glass

a mist of love you sign your shy
name to

furtive in the sky

as we end our fast?
___________________
8/29
29 Ramadan

At the pivot end of a life
(between this world and the next)

all the sleek black horses lined up for
inspection

all the torn and tattered love letters tied in their
appropriate bundles

and the words we’ve left in the air like
washing hanging out to dry

(some come back to us having been
happily stretched and whitened while others

track us down with yeah sad and
unsightly stains)

At the turning point where the
dark woods ahead begin to take

shape showing deeper and deeper shadows and
sharper contrasts

and the miles of galleries behind us with our
finger-paintings hung straight or hopelessly

askew are suddenly
neon lit

And at the poignant points of gratitude after
hurricane or flood earthquake or

Dracula-threat that turns out to be
nothing after all but

incessant mouse-squeaks

and we find ourselves high and dry in His Mercy as
usual with a

strong wind blowing through our clothes
and our breaths more mixed now with the

singsong melodies of the surrounding air
on both purple-shadowy mountain peak or

front porch on a couch with spouse in a
delicious downpour

But the pivot-point anytime anywhere
at any point

and the long or short lines of well-wishers
are everyone or no one as the death woods

open up doorways between trees and show
shadows both luscious and soberingly frightening

one step ahead of us with our
one foot still firm where we are in life

and the other tentatively raised for
forward movement

waiting a moment for the upsurge in our
hearts to show us which way ahead to go

(and ahead the
best place willingly or unwillingly

to go)

And this poem has no way of ending except this
pivot point in expectant tightrope

suspension between
this world with its presumed

finalities and the
next with its personal

Godly apocalypse somewhat
domesticated for use

at the constant and immediate
swivelingly bewildered and

drunkenly reflective

pivot end of a life
___________________
8/28
28 Ramadan

A raindrop big as a small
country is landing on our back garden

a powerful fragment at a time then
running in a fast moving runnel down the

back alley and all this even before
Hurricane Irene hits with full force

and as Irene means “peace” so
“Good Night Irene” as the

old song says may you
turn away from our shore and

dizzy yourself

out at sea somewhere to a
merriment of dolphins and a wild

spinning of silent dervish creatures of the
deeps Oh Allah! Preserve us from Your

watery Wrath that we might
see Your Might of Power with

humility

and flow in runnels with Your Perfect
Calm

a wall of water we walk through to Your
pure oasis

as the night wears on
_____________________
8/27
27 Ramadan
(Philadelphia)

NIGHTTIME SESSONS OF LIGHT
for Baji (who heard the geese
calling out Allah Allah)

Intense nighttime sessions of Light
spangle the planetary air and the

lunar crescendo yup I said the

lunar crescendo as we
head toward Ramadan’s exit back into

temptation’s roundelay yup I said

temptation’s roundelay that seems to go round and
round though for one blessed

month a year we step off it whether it
grinds to a halt or goes off its

spiraling pivot with sparks
screeching the asphalt as in

“Strangers on a Train” that
catastrophic carousel atilt in extremity

for all Eternity

But a crystally nighttime dome appears and we
look out onto blessed Blakean moonlight

and daytime geese across the sky above us
honk the Divine Name as

clearly as can be as they head toward
Canada in a fine summer rain

and we’re back on earth again
_____________________________
8/26
26 Ramadan
__________________________________________

THE REPETITIONS OF SAINTS

for Bawa Muhaiyuddeen (et al.)

The repetitions of saints flow through every
leaf and glisten hanging by threads from

branches of Divine Breath interwoven

in the universe’s big starry basket tilted in His
burning Glance and suspended by His

cool ocular steadiness throughout time to tip out
lively bubbles of intensest Grace in

which we live and that live in us for
all time to come as we

slide through the billion worlds by the pulse of those
repetitions heartbeat by heartbeat in the

saints’ huge bodies
thinner than a hair

held aloft for a nanosecond
in the air

I sit near the saint’s empty bed in his
green room where so many angels make for

barely enough elbow-space so
tightly packed angelic

elbow to elbow and
wing to incandescent wing

and everything’s become a giant ear
on a wave rising perceptibly entrance-ward

to God’s perfect everywhere
___________________
8/26
26 Ramadan

IF WE WOKE UP ONE MORNING

If we woke up one morning to find
we didn’t exist

would the fast be abrogated?

Or be more completely fulfilled?

If we were a
vague fractal outline among mountain crags or

mounded clouds

or mingled in aromatic breezes through
maple leaves in an

urban backyard whose branches lean
over a back alley fence

or a silence among howls of wolves
or the screeching of bus brakes

and we existed only as a peaceable serenity in a
transparent atmosphere that could

take place anywhere anytime on earth

watching through eyes God watches through
into the poignant brutalities of His

creation as well as its upsurging and
overpoweringly intense Light through it all

and we were here but not here just as
Ramadan’s four or more invisible dimensions

slide down into our lives in time and almost
make us non-existent in a

strange way with sharper sensitivities to
the fall of each sparrow or birth of each

moth who lands on our bathroom
mirror and suddenly

doubles itself facing itself where
before there was none

and we
see it land in its

bright fragile beauty
and are amazed
_____________________
8/25
25 Ramadan
_____________________________

BLUE CIRCLES

Tell again the story of how you saw the
two blue circles rhyme

as in a circus

and how the ground was wet and the
light hard to see by

and how a zebra loomed out of the
shadows and

caught you off guard as you
walked past the rotating bird

One night of the year when
God is so close you can almost see a

breath along the ground that
can’t be explained any other way

than divine
and the animals grow still

and the quiet becomes a
dimension in which we dwell

That night like no other
showing the worth of our waiting

and what we are made of
nothing we can quantify

of a worth whose worthlessness we
cannot estimate and a

worthlessness whose every one of us
is monarch of our little space

where God dwells and king becomes
slave to live in pure

mathematical harmony
with His self-erasing Infinity

enough light for the

blind tightrope walker to sing as she
crosses to the other side

above us
__________________________
8/25
25 Ramadan

Ramadan is a gorgeous chorus
repeated in a mist above glades of

green wheat bending in blue light

Ramadan meets itself coming in from
the rain with its face slick and shining

and sits at our table as it vanishes with all its
viands back into pure spirit set with

foaming golden goblets of Paradise

A warm breeze aromatic with jasmine
rises around our bodies as we

pass between miles of monotone graves on our
way to Eternity’s low doorway

A fountain appears in the middle of
everything and in its splashing music

proclaims exactly why we endure the
fast and how He will embrace us

on the other side in the
sweet exhaustion of our endurance

Scrolls of fire turn into waterfalls of
ice in the air all around us

each with our own particular wisdom

as the world sets like a planet under the
moon’s horizon of our lunar month

and we let its ribbons and streamers
go as it pursues its worldly parade

up to cliff-edge after cliff-edge of seemingly
unavoidable disaster

Ramadan has freed us and it’s for
us to remain in this concentrated

state now for Allah’s sake alone
eating the grapes of unity and sipping

its wine in every weather of
satisfaction with His

impeccable Decree
_________________
8/24
24 Ramadan

FAST

Puppets can’t break their fast
through their painted mouths

Rocks can be said to be
fasting forever

Mountain “fastnesses” are a kind of
stronghold or fortress

Colors are fast that never
cut and run

The Ramadan fast goes by day by
sometimes-uphill-day anything but

fast

though if we fasten ourselves to it
it seems to go faster

and with an “e” thrown in for
“effort” we can look

forward to a feast

and so faithfully fulfill our
fast
__________
8/22
22 Ramadan
_____________________________________

HEART & SOUL

If all my poems seem to end up in the
same place it’s because I

also want to end up there
grateful to God and

showered by the bliss of His Face

Starting from a shadow say cast by an
alleyway in Chinatown on a dark

Wednesday or off a ship say in Nova Scotia
smelling of codfish and sea brine or

landing in Rome hoping to visit the
languorous green vineyards of Tuscany

but moving forward in the time left to us
which might be decades or ten seconds only

each footstep a compass point pinpoint on our
still unrolling map with its

expectancies and definite concisions
leaving some slack time or clenching it

tighter for God’s own utterly precise
pinpointed compass pointing

to which we can only happily concede

always going with His sweet Will and
little of our own with eyes open and

His name and deep destination
always on our lips heart and soul

or when we suddenly remember having
momentarily dreamed our little life away

to get back to it

with forward lunge and straight shot
heading out both heart and soul to seek

His fortune and its plenitudes and
none of our own or only

as much of “our own” as will
help in the project

to get us there
__________________
8/23
23 Ramadan

A pinpoint and a compass point
a bismin and a galaxy

What do they have in common?

A cloud in the sky and a thought passing
through our heads with maybe even

more wind behind it

A single wave in the sea folding over and
under the great watery vastness and our

lives deeper than even the
darkest depths of its phosphorescent

darkness

with even more dazzling cosmos in them to all its
farthest reaches and most

specifically particular details though we

continue on past cosmos after all to where both
the edges and the actual edgelessness of this gorgeous

spectral universe no longer matter

and leaves the size of planets wave in
other-than-planetary breezes and rivers of a

water so sweet and fine flow to that
disappearing ocean of our mortality that

empties into even greater
waters of immortality as

defined by the promised sent Prophet to us
from The Sender of all prophets and

inspirations through time and to all
humankind out of time linking

pinpoints and counterpoints
compass points and bismins

sunrises and twilight
freedom from tyrants

and bright green skies that link these
worlds above all

in God’s most shiny and most
beauteous reflection of His

most Majestic
Face
___________________________
8/22
22 Ramadan
(bismin: In the Name of Allah)

Ramadan suns itself by the dark of night
and takes no notice of

earthquake or flood

Ramadan begins walking toward us from the
furthest hilltop of the previous year

and arrives at our door with
baskets of golden fruit

Although Ramadan seems most at home in
lavish “oriental” settings of jeweled

ewers and plashing fountains
our faces can best be reflected in its

battered tin plates and small sheltered ponds

No one has ever disappeared into Ramadan
never to be seen again

or if they do they appear again at the
Festival in bright silvery clothes

handing out sweets wrapped in our
most personal names

Ramadan is the most patient among us
and endures our anxieties with

perfect poise
never turning its face away

If we knew the treasures of Ramadan we would
want the fast to take place every

day of the year

but the sparkling gold of its coins dissolves into
denominational numbers when

Ramadan ends

If Ramadan were a horse it would be
a herd of the finest thoroughbreds

and each of us would be assigned the one most
suited to our variable temperaments

Ramadan is an ocean that waits each year in a
dimension of space and when it

bursts onto shore it
inundates our souls having transformed our

slightest actions into flying doves

Ramadan ends the way it begins
silently and with the

deepest humility

leaving through the same front door
through which it came

When the Prophet tightens his belt for
Ramadan each of us feels it

some losing and some gaining
the weight of its privations

Love arrives in the disguise of Ramadan
and when it removes its mask we find

it’s been with us all along
as familiar to us as

ourselves

but more than we were before
and less
____________________________
8/21
21 Ramadan