Rumi the big red book, p.38
Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 38
I am not something to sell.
I have already been bought.
Some souls flow like clear water.
They pour into our veins and feel like wine.
I give in to that. I fall flat.
We can sail this ship lying down.
Love is a wine that ferments and draws us to meet in the tavern
where we sit to enjoy the company of lovers
who recognize in us
the fragrance that brought them here.
Light wind of early morning,
have you seen that heart that I know,
the sun that melts granite?
The moon rose but could not find us here, circling,
so it praised another sema.
Dawn comes deep red, ashamed
how pale and passionless we look.
We have not walked in your rose garden for a long time.
Your eyes, those rare flowers,
have been kept out of our sight
as royalty stay aloof from the people.
We need to see your face.
In the beginning touch was my music.
Then the fierce cooking started.
I began to see the kindness of that.
When I became you, you left.
Chapter 43
Hercules: The Hero
Hercules is given twelve labors by Hera, queen of the gods, as revenge for Zeus’ infidelity with a mortal, Alcmene, his mother. His last labor is to descend into Hades and bring back Cerberus, the fierce three-headed dog that guards the gates and prevents the dead from returning to life.
When longing is sharp,
and the ruby color deep,
we welcome your grief,
but do not bring ambition or wanting,
or sleepy boredom.
Full moon. Quietly awake,
you look down from a corner of a roof,
reminding us that it is not time
to sleep, or to drink wine.
Tonight we are getting love messages.
For their sake we must not go to sleep.
The fragrance of your hair spreading through the streets
makes the perfumers wonder at such competition.
Grapes under feet that crush them
turn whichever way they are turned.
You ask why I turn around you?
Not around you, I turn around myself.
Gone, inner and outer,
no moon or ground or sky.
Do not hand me another glass of wine.
Pour it in my mouth.
I have lost the way to my mouth.
Hunted down, yet hunter.
Without a job, yet constantly working.
Do you want my head?
Friend, I make you a gift.
What is real is you and my love for you.
High in the air, unnoticed,
this reality rises into a dome.
I am the Capella.
I came and sat in front of you
as I would at an altar.
Every promise I made before
I broke when I saw you.
Do not come to us without bringing music.
We celebrate with drum and flute,
with wine not made from grapes,
in a place you cannot imagine.
Joyful for no reason,
I want to see beyond this existence.
You open your lips, laughing.
I think of a design for that opening.
I was a tiny bug. Now a mountain.
I was left behind. Now honored at the head.
You healed my wounded hunger and anger
and made me a poet that sings about joy.
Humble living does not diminish. It fills.
Going back to a simpler self gives wisdom.
When a man makes up a story for his child,
he becomes a father and a child together, listening.
You do not win here with loud publicity.
Union comes of nonbeing.
These birds do not learn to fly,
until they lose all their feathers.
Earlier, I promised myself
I would stay on the path.
Now, looking to the right and the left,
I see nothing but you.
Whatever I decide to do is inside you.
Step out on this road that has no end.
Seeing things at a distance is not the human experience.
A strong heart with many kinds of love
is what you most need for this setting out.
A strong body? Good for the animals.
The core of this wisdom is something like madness.
Love and insanity are often mistaken for one another.
As suffering deepens in your heart,
you become a stranger to yourself a thousand times.
Love comes and fills my skin,
veins and bones, every particle.
Only the letters of my name are left.
You are the rest.
Destiny does not obey our desiring.
Existence is meant to flow into absence.
All this is a shadow play
put on by our old nanny, a very skillful show,
but we are not actually here.
Inside the friend, where rose and thorn blend
to one opening point, the Qur’an,
the New Testament and the Old,
flow together to become one text.
But put nothing next to the beloved, no likenesses there,
where the lame donkey and the swift stallion are one mount.
Love’s drum has no question and no answer.
The mystery is its emptiness.
Lovers obey no rule.
Love is not a matter of existence,
but rather of absence.
Chapter 44
Pegasus: The Winged Horse
One version of the birth of the stallion Pegasus is that he sprang from Medusa’s neck as Perseus was beheading her. Wherever the horse’s hoof touched the ground, an inspiring spring of water flowed forth, the most famous being the Hippocrene (“horse spring”) on Mt. Helicon, the Muses’ Mount. Pegasus was mortal. On the last day of his life, when Zeus transformed him into a constellation, a single feather fell to earth.
As long as I can remember, I have wanted you.
I have made a monument of this loving.
I had a dream last night, but it is gone now.
All I know is I woke up like this again.
Drawn by your soul’s growing,
we gather like disheveled hair.
Even spirits come to bow.
We were dead. Now we are back.
My turban, my robe, my head,
those three for less than a penny.
My self, my name, not to be mentioned,
less than nothing.
At night you come here secretly,
and I want the darkness not to end.
But Night says, Look, you are holding the Sun.
So you are in charge of daylight.
The secret you told, tell again.
If you refuse, I will start crying.
Then you will say, Shhhhh,
now listen. I will say it over.
You were alone, I got you to sing.
You were quiet, I made you tell long stories.
No one knew who you were,
but they do now.
I have lived on the lip of insanity,
wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I have been knocking from the inside.
There is no love in me without your being,
no breath without that.
I once thought that I could give up this longing.
Then I thought again,
But I could not continue being human.
We are the night ocean filled with glints of light.
We are the space between the fish and the moon,
while we sit here together.
Sometimes afraid of reunion,
sometimes of separation.
You and I, so fond of the notion
of a you and an I, should live as though
we had never heard of those pronouns.
Two strong impulses.
One, to drink long and deep.
The other, not to sober up too soon.
The wine we really drink is our own blood.
Our bodies ferment in these barrels.
We give everything for a glass of this.
We give our minds for a sip.
Love enters, and the brilliant scholars get goofy.
The full moon becomes a simple dirt road.
Walk there with degenerates and saints,
with children and old people.
Be a slow pawn,
as well as the wide-ranging queen.
Then you will be king.
They end so quickly,
the noises we make.
A wolf tears open
the silly sheep’s throat.
Look at the people going there
with their heads prancing along.
One downstroke and they are dead.
They say it is night,
but I cannot tell day from night
in your presence.
Day could learn a lot
about light from your face.
Your love spreads into the sky and beyond it.
Your strong hand touches here where I hurt.
Wherever your feet have walked on this planet,
I go there secretly to lay my cheek.
A nightbird in his rapture for the dark
makes a clear wind sound.
Music has never been so beautiful.
I stare into a stream or sit beside flowers.
Inside this friendship.
In the beginning you pampered me with gifts.
Then you burned me with grief and difficulties.
You were rolling me like numbered dice.
When I died and became you,
you threw me, the numbering, and the dice
out completely beyond any space for games.
A human being is made of clay and sky.
Spirit beings wish they could move as we do.
They want our agility and purity.
And sometimes Lucifer marvels
at our cruelty, the coldness of our turning away.
Wherever I touch my head to the ground,
you are the one I point this full prostration toward.
You are praised in each of the six directions,
north, east, south, west, up, and down,
and beyond all that.
Rose garden, nightingale, every beauty of existence
is a no-form of you, the livingness you are.
Shams is wine, but not the kind
that muddles and brings regret.
Shams is music and light and fire.
He brings the majesty that lives
in the deep center of everyone.
Chapter 45
Lepus: The Hare
In Egyptian mythology the hare is associated with collecting and protecting the sacred eggs of life. In many mythologies there is a link between hares and eggs and the moon. Our children continue to recognize this fertile, creative connection every Easter.
Wine to intensify love, fire to consume.
We bring these, not like images from a dream reality,
but as an actual night to live through until dawn.
In complete control, pretending control,
with dignified authority, we are charlatans.
Or maybe just a goat’s-hair brush in a painter’s hand.
We have no idea what we are.
We donate a cloak to the man who does the washing.
We feel proud of our generosity.
We stare at the infinite, suffering ocean.
We fall in.
You are cold, but you expect kindness.
What you do comes back in the same form.
God is compassionate, but if you plant barley,
do not expect to harvest wheat.
Wandering the high empty plain,
for some evidence you have been here,
I find an abandoned body, a detached head.
Wine and stout,
one very old, the other new.
We will never have had enough.
Not being here, and being completely here,
the mixture is not bitter.
It is the taste we are.
Lying back in this presence,
unable to eat or drink,
I float freely
like a corpse in the ocean.
Do not give me back to my old companions.
No friend but you.
Inside you, I rest from wanting.
Do not let me be that selfishness again.
You reach out wanting the moon with your eyes, and Venus.
Build a place to live with those dimensions.
A shelter that can be knocked down with one kick,
it is best to go ahead and knock it down.
Sometimes visible, sometimes not,
sometimes devout Christians,
sometimes staunchly Jewish.
Until our inner love fits into everyone,
all we can do is take daily these different shapes.
My work is to carry this love
as comfort for those who long for you,
to go everywhere you have walked
and gaze at the pressed-down earth.
Birdsong brings relief to my longing.
I am just as ecstatic as they are,
but with nothing to say.
Please, universal soul, practice some song,
or something, through me.
When a storm sets love’s ocean wildly in motion,
not everyone can praise that mystery.
Only those who never break with the deep infinite
that sings underneath the changing surface.
You whisper into me,
and the way I love changes.
The way I think no longer exists.
What is it that you say
that is like a seed sown
and growing inside stone?
My king has gone,
my healing moon.
If he comes back,
and I am not here,
say, He had to leave,
just as you had to leave.
Chapter 46
Canis Major: The Great Dog
Sirius is the brightest star in the Great Dog. It is the nearest sun to us, only eight and a half light-years away.
Tonight, a singing competition.
Jupiter, the moon, and myself,
the friends I have been looking for.
Tonight with wine being poured,
and instruments singing among themselves,
one thing is forbidden,
one thing: Sleep.
The way of love
is not a subtle argument.
The door there
is devastation.
Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn that?
They fall, and falling,
they are given wings.
Let your throat-song be clear
and strong enough to make an emperor
fall full-length, suppliant, at the door.
I have phrases and whole pages memorized,
but nothing can be told of love.
You must wait until you and I
are living together.
In the conversation we will have then . . .
Be patient . . . Then . . .
Sometimes I call you wine, or cup,
or sunlight ricocheting off those,
or faintly immersed in silver.
I call you trap and bait,
and the game I am after,
all so as not to say your name.
I was happy enough to stay still
inside the pearl inside the shell,
but the hurricane of experience
lashed me out of hiding
and made me a wave moving into shore,
