Rumi the big red book, p.9
Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 9
IT IS ALL LAUGHING
Let your laughing face keep laughing,
like a moon, not born out of anyone,
but if it had been,
it would have been born laughing.
Joseph is elevated to the judgment chambers in Egypt.
Listen to the laughter from in there.
Locked double doors blow open.
Water pours. Fire catches. Wind breaks up.
Spring ground lifts a little finger.
It is all laughing.
THE REPLY
Water opens the garden like a new friendship.
Leaf says to fruit, Quit scratching your ear,
and come outside.
The sweet grape makes the deepest teacher,
because its trunk is spindly.
Lust is a winter the garden contracts in.
For how long? Too long.
Wash your face with springwater.
Now a branch of blooms talks to the basil, Lie down.
Birds say to trees, Hold us.
A rose to God, Do not let winter come again.
The reply: Do not grieve over December,
or Mongol tribes that raid Khorasan.
Those are my concern.
Juice does not flow from fruit
until you squeeze them.
I give unnumbered life
when I take away the numbers.
I serve wine that gives no headache
when I withhold the headache wine.
But you go on painting pictures
and blackening pages with print,
like smoke obscuring light.
Read the day instead of books.
Get off your horse and let him ride away,
the perfect equestrian.
THE DIVER’S CLOTHES LYING EMPTY
You are sitting here with us, but you are also
out walking in a field at dawn.
You are yourself the animal we hunt
when you come with us on the hunt.
You are in your body like a plant
is solid in the ground, yet you are wind.
You are the diver’s clothes lying empty
on the beach. You are the fish.
In the ocean are many bright strands and dark strands
like veins that are seen when a wing is lifted up.
Your hidden self is blood in those, those veins
that are lute strings that make ocean music,
not the sad edge of surf, but the sound of no shore.
DECORATING THE CELL
The drum we hear inside us now
we may not hear tomorrow.
We have such fear of what comes next. Death.
These loves are like pieces of cotton.
Throw them in the fire.
Death will be a meeting like that flaring up,
a presence you have always wanted to be with.
This body and this universe keep us from being free.
Those of you decorating your cells so beautifully,
do you think they will not be torn down?
The eventual demolishing of prisons is a given.
Fire-change, disaster-change,
you can trust that those will come around to you.
WITH YOU HERE BETWEEN
Lovers work,
so that when body and soul are no longer together,
their loving will be free.
Wash in wisdom-water,
so you will have no regrets about the time here.
Love is the vital core of the soul,
and of all you see, only love is infinite.
Your nonexistence before you were born
is the sky in the east.
Your death is the western horizon,
with you here between.
Your way leads neither east nor west, but in.
Test your love-wings and make them strong.
Forget the idea of religious ladders.
Love is the roof. Your senses are waterspouts.
Drink rain directly off the roof.
Waterspouts are easily damaged
and often must be replaced.
Say this poem in your chest.
Do not worry how it sounds going through your mouth.
A human body is a bow.
Breathing and speech are arrows.
When quiver and arrows are used up or lost,
there is nothing more for the bow to do.
A BIT OF EMBROIDERY
You have heard how the night is wide and long
for the sake of lovers and thieves.
We do the work of both.
I steal pearls from the king’s vault.
Why be content with a piece of cloth?
I am one of those subtle thieves
who find a way up to the roof this night
when everything human beings love is here for the taking.
There is nothing but your presence.
Let this subject rest.
Here is another story, strange and rare.
If you have not seen Christ, listen to this
as a white hawk hearing the drum
flies back to the king.
As a circle of gold gets stamped with the royal crest
and becomes a useful coin.
When you first became treasure,
you did not know that there is an informer
who tells where every treasure is hidden.
Bring your value here openly.
Do not pretend with prostrations,
or special commemorations, or abstinence.
Do not borrow a fancy shawl
and sit wrapped in a corner saying, I am Junnaiyd.
I am the Bestami of this age.
Give back what is not yours.
No excuses, no pretext.
Take in simple sunlight.
Be a bit of embroidery on Shams’s sleeve.
YOUR LOVE REVEALS YOUR BEAUTY
Give yourself a kiss.
If you live in China, do not look somewhere else,
in Tibet or in Mongolia.
If you want to hold the beautiful one,
hold yourself to yourself.
When you kiss the beloved,
touch your own lips with your fingers.
The beauty of every woman and every man is your beauty.
The confusion of your hair obscures that sometimes.
An artist comes to paint you
and stands there with his mouth open.
Your love reveals your beauty,
but all coverings would disappear if only for a moment
your holding back would stand before your generosity,
and ask, Sir, who are you?
At that, Shams’s life-changing face
gives you a wink.
THE WOOD AND THE FLAMES, STILL TALKING
No more wine for me.
I am past delighting in the thick red and the clear white.
I am thirsty for my own blood as it moves into a field of action.
Draw the keenest blade you have and strike,
until the head circles around the body.
Make a mountain of skulls like that.
Split me apart.
Do not stop at the mouth.
Do not listen to anything I say.
I must enter the center of the fire.
Fire is my child,
but I must be consumed and become fire.
Why is there crackling and smoke?
Because the wood and the flames are still talking.
You are too dense. Go away.
You are too wavering. I have solid form.
In the blackness those two friends keep arguing.
Like a wanderer with no face.
Like the most powerful bird in existence
sitting on its perch, refusing to move.
What can I say to someone so curled up with wanting,
so constricted in his love.
Break your pitcher against a rock.
We do not need any longer
to haul pieces of the ocean around.
We must drown, away from heroism,
and descriptions of heroism.
Like a pure spirit lying down,
pulling its body over it like a bride
her husband for a cover to keep her warm.
THE DAY I DIE
On the day I die,
when I am being carried toward the grave,
don’t weep.
Don’t say, He’s gone. He’s gone.
Death has nothing to do with going away.
The sun sets and the moon sets,
but they are not gone.
Death is a coming together.
The tomb looks like a prison,
but it is really release into union.
The human seed goes down in the ground
like a bucket into the well where Joseph is.
It grows and comes up full
of some unimagined beauty.
Your mouth closes here
and immediately opens
with a shout of joy there.
OLD, YET FRESHLY BEGUN
Here is where you live. Come inside.
Touch what is not, and then this is.
Raise dust in both worlds.
Then the going goes the same:
pain, difficulty; peace, pleasure.
But you are beyond those four,
beyond the winding way.
Old as what has no starting out, yet freshly begun,
wound and salve for the dervish.
All religions bow to you at the sky’s table,
where the sun sits down just as the moon leaves.
But at the autumn feast of Shams’s love
you will not be chosen for sacrifice.
You are too lean a lamb for that.
NEVER QUITE AS ALIVE
You are the winged one set free and flying,
while a hundred others stay confined.
You are the clear-eyed hawk, the low-murmuring dove,
the red-and-green-spike-of-color parrot,
friend to both high and low,
wonder with no sadness about existence or nonexistence,
source of courageous enthusiasm.
I was shut tight in something like grief.
You opened the door.
But now you have turned your face and gone away.
You put my life in danger with this going.
Like Isaac you are the friend of every soul.
Whoever loses such a friend will never be quite as alive
as they were when they were with you.
Chapter 7
Al-Haqq, The Truth
The strength of the quality of truth is that of letting the mystery remain in itself, intact, not reduced to formula. Let the logical and the linear take forms. Truth remains formless and free. I asked a Tibetan monk once for help with my writing. “Quit being a writer,” he said as he opened his arms to the sky. Rumi had a flute player named Hamza. When Hamza played, it was as though Nothing were playing anonymous music. Everything in nature is begging you to die before you die, to follow the moth’s example. You have an Egypt within you, miles of riverside canebrake, the source of all sweetness, yet you reach for external forms. You are yourself the desired one, Joseph. Close your eyes and gaze in the mirror at the flame that lit your senses. The Unseen One said once on Sinai, “You shall not see me.” But even though he said that, I have filled the essence of that he with my soul, the Christian Trinity, the Zoroastrian light-and-dark, old Taoist poems about floating and watching the changing light, Zen haiku, and much else. So union finds a new way to be, recklessly exposed. Every soul is a king with no flag and no parapet to shield him from the sun.
HAMZA’S NOTHING
A moth, flying into the flames, says with its wing fire, Try this.
The wick with its knotted neck broken tells you the same.
A candle as it diminishes, explains, Gathering more and more
is not the way. Burn, become light and heat. Melt.
The ocean sits in the sand
letting its lap fill with pearls and shells,
then empty. The bitter taste hums, This.
The phoenix gives up on good-and-bad, flies to nest on Mt. Qaf,
no more burning and rising from ash. It sends out one message.
The rose purifies its face, drops the soft petals, shows its thorn,
and points. Wine abandons thousands of famous names,
the vintage years and delightful bouquets,
to run wild and anonymous through your brain.
Empty, the flute closes its eyes to Hamza’s nothing.
Everything begs with the silent rocks for you to be flung out
like light over this plain, the presence of Shams Tabriz.
ANOTHER INVITATION
My mouth, my entire body, laughs.
A rose is all rose.
My loving is here with you.
You come before dawn with a torch, and you take me,
but my soul remains back there alone.
Issue another invitation.
Do not ask for one without the other.
If you do not go tonight and bring my soul to me,
I will become a loud, disruptive noise,
and I will not be making it alone.
MILES OF RIVERSIDE CANEBRAKE
The news has come, but you must not have heard.
Jealousy has changed to love.
Do you have any love left?
The moon has opened its face and its wings made of light.
Borrow eyes to see this, if yours cannot.
Night and day an arrow comes toward you
from a hidden bow.
If you have no shield and nowhere to hide
from the death that is always coming closer,
you may as well yield.
The copper of your being
has already been transmuted to gold by Moses’ alchemy,
and yet you fumble in a money bag for coins.
You have within you an Egypt,
miles of riverside canebrake, the source of all sweetness,
yet you worry whether candy will come
from a store outside yourself.
External form, you reach for shapes,
yet you are the Joseph.
Close your eyes and gaze in the mirror
at the flame that lit your senses.
Your body is a camel
going swift and straight to the Kaaba.
You think you are idling around town on a donkey,
or heading off the opposite way, but you are not.
This caravan is a triumph
being drawn directly into God’s reality.
ALIVE WITH SCRIPTURE
Every moment a voice comes out of the sky,
a verse, Creation is ample and full of grace.
Sura 51:47
Those who hear this in the soul respond.
They turn to God. They praise.
They bow down all the way with gratitude.
Sura 9:112
To the lord of ladders
by which the spirit ascends.
Sura 70:4
The carpenter of the imagination
has no way to make such a ladder.
Only the one who says, All are returning.
Sura 21:93
But the patient adze blade can help.
To receive what is given, be diligent.
Sura 28:80
Watch someone working with an adze.
Dissolve in that steady work.
Do not jump to some expected outcome,
saying, We will surely win.
Sura 26:44
Stay stubborn, as the adze blade nicks hardwood.
If you move up two rungs,
the people on the right will claim you.
If you reach the roof, they will say,
Above the above, on the star highways.
Sura 51:10
Sufi of the world’s community,
rise to the circle of Sura 37:165,
the blessed arranged in adoration.
Listen. Be so empty
that nothing but God is left.
Purify the learning
that keeps you from knowing.
Sura 59:13
Bow like nun, the twenty-fifth Arabic letter,
like the gerund sound -ing at the end of a word.
Lie flat. Become soul-writ,
Sura 68, which begins with nun,
so alive with scripture
that you stand for those who have no hypocrisy.
Root like a lotus, plunging deep in the mud,
that does not mind a death wind in its leaves.
Wait, for I am waiting too.
Sura 52:30
Study the orchard of some soul
that has lost the power to grow anything.
Sura 68:20
That stays in its disastrous sleep,
a morning black as midnight.
Sura 68:19
YOU SHALL NOT SEE ME
You are rest for my soul,
a surprising joy for my bitterness.
Imagination has never imagined
what you give to me.
The sound of someone whistling in the street,
