Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 8
The puppet show is charming,
but go behind the screen and see who runs it.
Wash your hands and face of all this.
Someone who tries for these prizes
burns up quickly like wood chips.
There is a friend who will help you,
the one who turned the wheel
and brought us out of nonexistence,
the sweet-breathing one.
These words are ways of just adding up our breaths.
It is better to be silent inside the friend’s breathing.
THE MILL
The heart is a wheat grain.
We are the mill where this body is the millstone
and thought, the moving river.
The body asks the river why it runs on so.
The river says, Ask the miller who made the millrace
that directs my falling that turns your stone.
The miller says, You that love bread,
if this turning were not happening,
what would you dip in your broth?
So a lot of questioning goes on
around the milling of wheat.
But what, really, is this breadmaking work?
Let silence now speak about wheat and the river,
about the heart and the intellect,
about the miller and his millstone-body,
about the taste of bread dipped in soup,
and this delicious listening we do at the mill.
THE ELUSIVE ONES
They are lovers again. Sugar dissolving in milk.
Day and night, no difference.
The sun is the moon, an amalgam.
Their gold and silver melt together.
This is the season when the dead branch
and the green branch are the same branch.
The cynic bites his finger because he cannot understand.
Omar and Ali on the same throne, two kings in one belt.
Nightmares fill with light like a holiday.
Men and angels speak one language.
The elusive ones finally meet.
The essence and the evolving forms
run to meet each other
like children to their father and mother.
Good and evil, dead and alive,
everything blooms from one natural stem.
You know this already. I’ll stop.
Any direction you turn it is one vision.
Shams, my body is a candle touched with fire.
A GARDEN WHERE THE HOUSE WAS
I am lost in your face, in your lost eyes.
The drunk and the madman inside me
take a liking to each other.
They sit down on the ground together.
Look at this mess of a life
as the sun looks fondly into ruins.
With one glance many trees grow from a single seed.
Your two eyes are like a Turk born in Persia.
He is on a rampage, a Persian shooting Turkish arrows.
He has ransacked my house,
so that no one lives here anymore,
just a boy running barefooted all through it.
Your face is a garden that comes up where the house was.
With our hands we tear down houses and make bare places.
The moon has no desire to be described.
No one needs this poetry.
The loose hair strands of a beautiful woman
do not have to be combed.
AFTER BEING IN LOVE, THE NEXT RESPONSIBILITY
Turn me like a waterwheel turning a millstone.
Plenty of water, a living river.
Keep me in one place and scatter the love.
Leaf-moves in wind, straw drawn toward amber,
all parts of the world are in love,
but they do not tell their secrets.
Cows grazing on a sacramental table,
ants whispering in Solomon’s ear.
Mountains mumbling an echo. Sky, calm.
If the sun were not in love,
he would have no brightness,
the side of the hill no grass on it.
The ocean would come to rest somewhere.
Be a lover as they are,
that you may come to know your beloved.
Be faithful that you may know faith.
The other parts of the universe
did not accept the next responsibility as you can.
They were afraid they might make a mistake with it,
the inspired knowing that springs from being in love.
THORNBUSH MUSIC
Jasmine comes up where you step.
You breathe on dirt, it sails off like a kite.
You wash your hands,
and the water you throw out shines with gold.
You say the first line of the Qur’an,
and all the dead commentators lift their heads.
Your robe brushes a thornbush,
and a deep chord of music comes.
Whatever you break
finds itself more intelligent for being broken.
Every second a new being
stands in the courtyard of your chest like Adam,
without a mother or a father,
but the beginning of many generations to come.
I should rhyme that fifty times.
The beginning of many generations to come,
a line without any inclination to end.
But I won’t. I close my mouth
in hopes that you will open yours.
SPINDRIFT
Do not worry about saving these songs.
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it does not matter.
We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.
The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world’s harp should burn up,
there will still be hidden instruments playing.
So the candle flickers and goes out.
We have a piece of flint and a spark.
This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.
Poems reach up like spindrift
and the edge of driftwood along the beach, wanting.
They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we cannot see.
Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.
SPILLINGS
This mirror inside me shows
I cannot say what, but I cannot not know.
I run from body. I run from spirit.
I do not belong anywhere.
I am not alive.
Do you smell the decay?
You talk about my craziness.
Listen rather to the honed-blade sanity I say.
This gourd head on top of a dervish robe,
do I look like someone you know?
This dipper gourd full of liquid,
upside down and not spilling a drop.
Or if it spills, it drops into God and rounds into pearls.
I form a cloud over that ocean and gather the spillings.
When Shams is here, I rain.
After a day or two, lilies sprout, the shape of my tongue.
Chapter 6
Al-Hayy, The Living
When those who love meet each other’s eyes, an expansion comes that cannot be contained in what the pronouns refer to, you and I and we, those imaginary beings. A livingness comes that is beyond pronouns, a vitality with a lot of laughter in it, and limitless motion. Lovers keep moving. Even as they seem to settle down, they are really being borne along aloft like a flock of gnats inside the wind. Music, a variety of roses in conversation, lute strings resonating with ocean-sound. These are some of the images that Rumi explores for how it is to be alive. The poet Bill Stafford, in his writing classes, tried to get each individual to decide on his or her own what it was in their writing that they liked, without any interference from a teacher or other students. He responded with a lot of “Uh-huh” and “I see,” but no judgment. He could outwait you. He had such tremendous respect for the student writer’s independence and integrity. That was a deeply settled thing in him. The living river of your life is continuously changing. Drink from it. Let that taste tell you how to move.
THE VERGE OF TEARS
You make our souls tasty like rose marmalade.
You cause us to fall flat on the ground
like the shadow of a cypress still growing at its tip.
Rainwater through a mountain forest,
we run after you in different ways.
We live like the verge of tears inside your eyes.
Don’t cry. You trick some people with gold ropes.
You tie them up and leave them.
Others you pull near at dawn.
You are the one within every attraction. All silence.
You are never alone, never that,
but you must be distracted, because look,
you have taken the food you were going to give Jesus
out to the stable and put it down in front of the donkey.
ENTERING THE SHELL
Love is alive, and someone borne along by it
is more alive than lions roaring
or men in their fierce courage.
Bandits ambush others on the road.
They get wealth, but they stay in one place.
Lovers keep moving, never the same, not for a second.
What makes others grieve they enjoy.
When they look angry, do not believe their faces.
It is spring lightning, a joke before the rain.
They chew thorns thoughtfully along with pasture grass.
Gazelle and lioness, having dinner.
Love is invisible except here, in us.
Sometimes I praise love; sometimes love praises me.
Love, a little shell somewhere on the ocean floor,
opens its mouth.
You and I and we, those imaginary beings,
enter that shell as a single sip of seawater.
A MIXED-BREED APPLE
A little mixed-breed apple,
half red, half yellow, tells this story.
A lover and beloved get separated.
Their being apart was one thing,
but they have opposite responses.
The lover feels pain and grows pale.
The beloved flushes and feels proud.
I am a thorn next to my master’s rose.
We seem to be two, but we are not.
WHAT YOU GAVE
Why are you lying in the middle of the road?
From the love-wine you poured.
I may be excessive with my giveaway impulses,
but I still have what you gave
when you held my head against your chest.
You pour what you pour
without a flask, without a cup.
That mastery and generosity
washes away all restraint.
Reason burst just for the joy of it
when you gave me the bowl.
Something flows from your eyes
that is beyond a thousand false desires.
DESOLATION
From the left and from the right
come vilification and blame,
but you stay filled with compassion.
The moon gives light so generously
that the dogs bay at it.
They do not affect the moon.
They are like critics, each with a certain specialty.
A lover is a mountain,
not flecks of dead grass blown about.
A lover is a flock of gnats,
alive and lost inside the wind.
If it is true that rules rise from love,
it is also true that lovers pay no attention to rules.
Desolation everywhere is true cultivation.
Ignoring benefits is a benefit in love.
Jesus calls from the fourth heaven,
where communion is celebrated.
Welcome. Wash your hands and face.
It is time to sit at the table together.
CHOOSE A SUFFERING
Yesterday in the assembly I saw my soul
inside the jar of the one who pours.
Do not forget your job, I said.
He came with his lighted face, kissed the full glass,
and as he handed it to me,
it became a red-gold oven taking me in,
a ruby mine, a greening garden.
Everyone chooses a suffering that will change
him or her to a well-baked loaf.
Abu Lahab, biting his hand, chose doubt.
Abu Huraya, his love for cats!
One searches a confused mind for evidence.
The other has a leather sack full of what he needs.
If we could be silent now,
the master would tell us some stories
that they hear in the high council.
THE DEATH OF SALADIN
You left ground and sky weeping,
mind and soul full of grief.
No one can take your place in existence or in absence.
Both mourn, the angels, the prophets,
and this sadness I feel
has taken from me the taste of language,
so that I cannot say the flavor of my being apart.
The roof of the kingdom within has collapsed.
When I say the word you, I mean a hundred universes.
Pouring grief-water or secret dripping in the heart,
eyes in the head or eyes of the soul,
I saw yesterday that all of these
flow out to find you when you are not here.
That bright firebird Saladin went like an arrow,
and now the bow trembles and sobs.
If you know how to weep for human beings,
weep for Saladin.
THE MUSIC WE ARE
Did you hear that winter is over?
The basil and carnation cannot control their laughter.
The nightingale, back from his wandering,
has been made singing master over all the birds.
The trees reach out their congratulations.
The soul goes dancing through the king’s doorway.
Anemones blush because they have seen the rose naked.
Spring, the only fair judge, walks in the courtroom,
and several December thieves steal away.
Last year’s miracles will soon be forgotten.
New creatures whirl in from nonexistence,
galaxies scattered around their feet.
Have you met them?
Do you hear the bud of Jesus crooning in the cradle?
A single narcissus flower has been appointed
Inspector of Kingdoms. A feast is set.
Listen. The wind is pouring wine.
Love used to hide inside images. No more.
The orchard hangs out its lanterns.
The dead come stumbling by in shrouds.
Nothing can stay bound or be imprisoned.
You say, End this poem here, and wait for what is next.
I will. Poems are rough notations for the music we are.
GLORY TO MUTABILIS1
Spring is how the soul renews and refreshes itself.
Fields damp and sprouting, roses glowing,
birds learning to talk.
Morning wind animating everything.
Cypress bends to iris, Tell me dear . . .
Iris to tulip, Show me how you are faithful.
Plane trees play their tambourines.
Pine trees clap hands. Doves do
their one-note question, Coo, Where?
Which means, Be visibly here with us.
A pink rose stands straight. Violets kneel.
Grape leaves do full prostration.
A new kind of poetry is coming.
Glory makes promises again to Mutabilis.
Thunder says, Wash your face in this,
and your hands and your feet.
Narcissus blinks and comes near the nightingale to say,
We need a new song.
Reply: This is for love’s emptiness.
Now the green ones dress like Khidr.
It is time to hear the secrets dervishes know.
No. The Penelope and the jasmine agree.
Silence is the best alchemy.
THE MOST ALIVE MOMENT
The most alive moment comes when those who love each other
meet each other’s eyes and in what flows between them then.
To see your face in a crowd of others,
or alone on a frightening street, I weep for that.
Our tears improve the earth. The time you scolded me,
your gratitude, your laughing,
always your qualities increase the soul.
Seeing you is a wine that does not muddle or numb.
We sit inside the cypress shadow where amazement
and clear thought twine their slow growth into us.
