Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 10
or asking questions, if that person brings word of you,
those sounds are worth more than all the world’s poetry.
There is nothing I want but your presence.
In friendship, time dissolves.
Life is a cup. This connection is pure wine.
What else are cups for?
I used to have twenty thousand different desires.
The unseen king said once on Sinai,
You shall not see me.
But even though he said that he was not,
I have filled the essence of that he with my soul.
The Christian Trinity, the Zoroastrian light-and-dark,
I absorb them all.
Though my body has not noticed,
union has begun to see a new way to be.
Grown old with grief and longing,
when someone says Tabriz,
I am young again.
A BRIGHTENING FLOOR
There is a soul spring that adds to everyone’s awareness,
a friend who brings peace and healing silence to death.
I work for the kindness that touches stone and pearl the same,
that sees a garden peacock equal with the road raven.
Form dissolves, but wisdom remains.
Your soul and your loving mix with the mud of your body,
but they have their pleasures apart.
Shams steps into the room bringing blessings,
a brightening floor and a star decorating the roof.
WIND THAT MIXES WITH YOUR FIRE
I see myself as a thorn. I move near the rose.
As vineyard, I remember the vintner’s skill.
As a cup of poison, I long to be the antidote.
I am a glass of wine with dark sediment.
I pour it all in the river.
I am sick. I reach for Jesus’ hand.
Immature, I look for one who knows.
Out of the ground a poem grows eye medicine.
Now love says to me, Good.
But you cannot see your own beauty.
I am the wind that mixes with your fire,
that stirs and brightens, then makes you gutter out.
NOT INTRIGUED WITH EVENING
What the material world values
does not shine the same in the truth of the soul.
You have been interested in your shadow.
Look instead directly at the sun.
What can we know by just watching
the time-and-space shapes of each other?
Someone half awake in the night sees imaginary dangers.
The morning star rises. The horizon grows defined.
People become friends in a moving caravan.
Nightbirds may think daybreak a kind of darkness,
because that is all they know.
It is a fortunate bird who is not intrigued with evening,
who flies in the sun we call Shams.
A LION LOOKING FOR LAUGHTER
Your face here suddenly like spring.
Applause, laughter.
You sit in the pomegranate branches
so tickled with the beauty.
This town would disappear
without the sound of your opening,
your creek-noise laughing,
like the deep redness of hundreds of roses.
Inside the love-forest a lion walks looking for laughter.
Dawn. The sun comes up from a different direction.
The Lord is tricky today. No one knows what next.
Shams and God’s qualities in Shams
compose an ocean in us
where laughter pearls plump into being.
THE FACE
So the frowning teacher came and left.
He is very consistent with that vinegar face.
But maybe he shows that to us and smiles with others.
Such a beautiful teacher, but so sour.
He is a pure standard for tartness.
Consider how your face is a source of light.
If you enter a grieving room with the friend in your eyes,
light will bloom there according to the laws of sweet and sour.
Locked in a cell, you grow bitter,
but out walking in morning sunlight with friends,
how does that taste?
There are exceptions.
Joseph caught the rose fragrance
down in his abandoned wellhole.
In this quietness now
I feel someone seated on my right
like a kindness that will never leave.
GREED AND GENEROSITY
Look at this face.
Open your eyes into these eyes.
When you laugh, everyone falls in love.
Lift your head up off the table.
See, there are no edges to this garden.
Sweet fruits, every kind you can think of,
branches green, and always slightly moving.
How long should you look at the earth’s face?
Come back and look again.
Now you see the nervous greed,
deep inside plants and animals.
Now you see them constantly giving themselves away.
Greed and generosity are evidence of love.
If you cannot see love itself, see the results.
If you cannot find the love-colors in anything,
look for the pale, tired face of a lover.
Take this town with its stores
and everyone running around,
some with a lot of money, some without any.
THE RIGHTS OF CRYING
Why so fugitive?
I have some right to be with you,
the rights of crying.
If there were laughter all around me,
I would still feel closed in if you were not there.
With my children and everyone else I loved,
I would still be distracted.
How can I tie down one of your feet?
I do not have enough strength or patience.
No matter how far you go,
even beyond sunlight into where Jesus is visible,
I will come and wait to be told
why you go away from me.
THE OTHER THING
There are a few resistance pockets left,
patches of shade the sun has not struck,
but mostly this universe is transformed.
Every star has become the evening star.
Every soul is a king with no flag and no parapet
to shield him from direct light.
Go within, and discover this land
where everyone is a living soul under a wide sky-field
with a king entering from the other side, a jubilee,
a singing where wine and dessert and the other thing
are given away.
Last night I was out of myself.
If I were that way again,
I could finish this poem, but I am not.
My poet-self is a protective pawn put before the king,
who is Shams,
who changes every being to an ocean,
and every body to a coral reef.
MY WORST HABIT
My worst habit is I get so tired of winter
I become a torture to those I am with.
If you are not here, nothing grows.
I lack clarity. My words tangle and knot up.
How to cure bad water? Send it back to the river.
How to cure bad habits? Send me back to you.
When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools,
dig a way out through the bottom to the ocean.
There is a secret medicine given only to those
who hurt so hard they cannot hope.
The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.
Look as long as you can at the friend you love,
no matter whether that friend is moving away from you,
or coming back toward you.
SOUL AND FRIEND
Soul: where this tree grows
and learns to drink without getting drunk.
Soul soaks into existence everywhere
except my rough, contemptuous personality.
Friend: intelligence, sometimes the soul,
water, bread, a cave where we sit with friends.
Invisible bowl to drink from,
health coming back to a patient.
Definite statement, pulsing spring, cloud.
I’ll stop, not because words have become tedious,
but to keep that bird sitting on its branch.
Chapter 8
As-Salaam, Peace
Being fully alive in the moment has a peace to it, a continuous beginning. The tailor, settled among his shop goods, quietly sewing, sitting tailor-fashion, as though in meditation. Repose inside work is deep nourishment. There is a clarity inside surrender. It is like what comes with the restraint from food and words during Ramadan. The sky is a lens to look through. We are finding new ways to wander within this majestic imagination. The holiday we have been waiting for is here. The friends we have wanted to be with have come. One of Rumi’s metaphors for what it is like to be a lover is a fish in the sea. You have seen the way fish seem to be enjoying the ocean? That is how a lover moves through the intelligence of this life that we are inside.
CALM IN THE MIDST OF LIGHTNING
When the love lion wants to drink our blood,
we let him.
Every moment we offer up a new soul.
Someone comes to collect the turban and the shoes.
Calm in the midst of lightning
stands the cause of lightning.
The way I look is so fragile,
yet here in my hand is an assurance of eternity.
A snake drags along looking for the ocean.
What would it do with it?
If for penance, you crush grapes,
you may as well drink the wine.
You imagine that the old Sufis
had dark sediment in their cups.
It does not matter what you think.
The flower that does not smile at the branch
withers.
Shams Tabriz rises as the sun.
It is night now.
What is the point of counting stars?
A MOUNTAIN NEST
Have you seen a fish dissatisfied with the ocean?
Have you seen a lover?
Have you seen an image
that tries to avoid the engraver?
Have you seen a word emptied of meaning?
You need no name.
You are the ocean. I am held in your sway.
Fire in your presence turns to a rosebush.
When I am outside of you, life is a torment.
Then Solomon walks back into Jerusalem,
and a thousand lanterns illuminate.
The divine glory settles into a mountain nest.
The emperor and the source of light, Shams Tabriz,
lives here with no location in my chest.
FULL SUN
There is one who teaches the moon
and the evening star their beauty.
Muslims, I am so mingled with that
that no one can mingle with me.
I was born of this love,
so now I hang from this branch.
Shadows are always changing, fleeing.
I feel that fear.
There is no peace except in full sun.
A voice says, Quick, the rope trick,
and, Where did the moth go?
When you hear that,
coil the rope and begin to climb.
Fly straight into the candle, this burning so dear
no coolness can tempt us out of its flame.
BEGIN
This is now. Now is.
Do not postpone till then.
Spend the spark of iron on stone.
Sit at the head of the table.
Dip your spoon in the bowl.
Seat yourself next to your joy,
and have your awakened soul pour wine.
Branches in the spring wind,
easy dance of jasmine and cypress.
Cloth for green robes
has been cut from pure absence.
You are the tailor,
settled among his shop goods, quietly sewing.
A CLEAN SANDY SPOT
You blame and give advice,
and recommend medicinal spells.
You make detailed analyses and loud public conclusions
about this company of lovers.
Do you really consider yourself a lover?
A flat, clean, sandy spot gives wheat to the barn for nothing.
No particle can grow to seedling from anything but the whole.
You know this.
Why this continuous personal critique?
Love’s fire puts a sad smile on.
Advice rarely brings the coolness of peace.
The moon’s ashy light covers this world
as love waits quietly for a bird in the branches of some town,
say Tabriz, to begin.
A VAGUE TRACE
Soul gave me this box of emptiness.
What I say is one truth I know.
I go to neither side of any argument.
I stay in the center, letting explanations rise from failure,
this weeping witness face, this saffron tulip,
a vague trace.
Whoever understands me like Saladin does,
this is for you, this opening.
TALKING THROUGH THE DOOR
You say, Who is at the door?
I say, Your slave.
You say, What do you want?
To see you and bow.
How long will you wait?
Until you call.
How long will you cook?
Until the resurrection.
We talk through the door.
I claim a great love and that I had given up
what the world gives to be in that love.
You say, Such claims require a witness.
I say, This longing, these tears.
You say, Discredited witnesses.
I say, Surely not.
You say, Who did you come with?
I say, This majestic imagination that you gave me.
Why did you come?
The musk of your wine was in the air.
What is your intention?
Friendship.
What do you want from me?
Grace.
Then you ask, Where have you been most comfortable?
In the palace.
What did you see there?
Amazing things.
Then why is it so desolate?
Because all that can be taken away in a second.
Who can do that?
This clear discernment.
Where can you live safely then?
In surrender.
What is this giving up?
A peace that saves us.
Is there no threat of disaster?
Only what comes in your street, inside your love.
How do you walk there?
In perfection.
Now silence. If I tell more of this conversation,
those listening will leave themselves.
There will be no door,
no roof or window either.
LOOK, FISH
I saw the friend clearly,
and I stopped reading books and memorizing poems.
I quit going to church and fasting
to be a better person.
I quit worrying about when I should be praying.
I saw how I was undisciplined and toxic.
I saw how lovely and strong.
No mercy for the drunk, a full sentence.
Let the beautiful one come out in fine clothes.
Wind his hair into God’s rope.
Twist the braids into a cross for Christians to see.
His light is better than the sun’s.
How could he have gotten so withered and weak?
Now he jokes and pounds the table.
He was wine under a lid, Joseph at the bottom of the well.
Know yourself in the light of the true ones,
as the ground sees its face in a garden,
as rock knows its own secret when put next to a ruby,
iron next to polished steel. Come into existence.
Flies go round to every pile of dung,
and finally out of that compost comes the Anya bird,
the true man. When a person is born
of this new moment, it does not wear off tomorrow.
Sit with lovers and be useful. Do not wander away.
Look, fish, at the ocean behind you.
Go back where you came from, sea creature.
You hear the sound of water,
and you know where you want to be.
Why wait? You have gone places that you regret going
for money and other reasons. Do not do that again.
Water says, Live here.
Do not carry me around in buckets and pans.
Those are false duties. Rest and be quiet.
IN PRISON
Do not despair in prison.
