Solitary tree
Do you feel yourself
standing on the platform of the earth
served up as if for my pleasure alone?
Alone, yet not lonely,
happy in the sunrise, or shining
in sheets of rain, you wait again
for the warbler to sing.
Patiently, you hold her
in your quiet branches,
where she sits or flits, free
in an improvisation of notes
high and low, never touched
twice the same.
Trade your cleverness for abandonment.
~ Rumi
Rumi's way:Today, like every other day, we wake up emptyand frightened. Don't open the door to the studyand begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.Let the beauty we love be what we do.There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks
Poetry should be heard. Listen to Coleman Barks read these lines for a couple of minutes, with musical accompaniment, introduced by Garrison Keillor. I can hardly separate Rumi from Barks' voice, in translation, and sonorous recitation. In this recording, you can feel, there are no fences.
An older woman helps a girl to play a guitar, possibly of Syrian origin. Leighton developed a deep interest in Eastern art and architecture after his first trip to Algeria in 1857, and here we can see him introducing this into his art. The two figures are surrounded by and dressed in souvenirs from Damascus. The architectural setting for the painting shares an affinity with George Aitchinson's contemporary designs for the Arab Hall at Leighton House, although it has also been linked with the sixteenth century mosque of Suleiman Pasha at Damascus.
What and where I was a few nights ago
I wasn't a star.
Not a rain cloud.
Or a rose.
I was not the barn, or a bird flying out its chink.
The reflected sky-silk on the pavement
was thicker than a hundred of me—
not even an opal fingernail.
A pile of mountains
on a weave of snowmelt
in an ocean of red planets
brushed across the eyelid of air
like a fox
and twitched its tail.
I was a minute that couldn’t.
I couldn't touch the bud at the tip
of next spring’s twig-tongue.
I was no thing. No word. No body.
The air said: We are invisible.
And then there was
no where we weren't.
A year in an apple
Crunch into the sweet flesh,
and winter snow crumbles under a black branch
where the juncko lands.
With the second bite, the entire orchard
blossoms pink again in your mouth.
Hold its red skin against your cheek
and it is a hot summer day
but you are cool in the shade
of the tree it fell from.
It is autumn, you are eating an apple.
For a few moments remember the year,
how it opened and fell into a thousand pieces
and how you widened your being.
Our Lady, and the onions of Chartres
Her mismatched spires grow like flamboyant Gothic stalks of wheat and corn out of the fecund plain of Beauce. In medieval days the bounty from these fields was stacked on the cathedral steps, which served as the town bazaar. On the south porch, onions, potatoes and turnips were sold from baskets and wagons under three arches where Jamb’s saints and martyrs in stone supervised. For centuries pilgrims have crawled to Mary’s treasured dress inside—the Sancta Camisia— the sepia’d muslin garment the virgin mother wore over her labor-convulsing body when her boy was born, frail now as onion skin, behind glass and guarded by seraphim. Where has she gone, that woman? I want to feel her warm belly through the dress, the baby kicking. I want to hear her croon to him when his little paw jerks in the air and she nudges her nipple into his trembling mouth.
I am standing under the red and blue pools of brilliant clerestory windows beholding how the brown and buff stone of the labyrinth floor curves and hooks. In the stunning Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière (our lady of the beautiful window) Mary wears a dress of lapis lazuli (the pigment patrons bought for painters more valuable than gold, to give her honor). She is impossibly high, with censers swinging over her crown. The straight, plain wooden chairs have been removed from the floor this one day in a month, so I can walk the labyrinth, slowly. I invite her spirit to rest upon me. It is the year of epiphany, the zenith of my soul’s quest, yet as a result of my measured steps no flames fall from the windows or maternal roots of mystical spirituality curl around my pilgrim feet. The virgin does not bare her glassy breast and offer sacred blue milk. The womb of the church is empty, dark, silent.
We go out and cross the cold street into a cozy brasserie for rustic onion soup, the tables close and crowded under centuries of beams. I excuse myself to find the toilet up a winding stair and half-way up come to a room with its door ajar and window open. Light from the late afternoon sun reflects off the stone building across the street, pouring in on nothing but sacks and sacks of onions wall to wall and piled, spilling upon each other like stones in a quarry, like the fallen stones of Jerusalem. I stare what seems a good while at the nimbuses of holiness surrounding each little onion head and their burlap wraps. How sleepily alive they seem. I go up to the toilet and come back down, pausing one last time at the onion nap room. Back at the table the soup has arrived. I stir the hot salty broth, twirling the white rings, playing like a dervish in a schoolyard with my spoon. I consume, and am consumed by, the labyrinth of the onion.
At the orchard
It is a late Saturday afternoon in early
October, and I am headed nowhere,
certainly not the cider-and-doughnut orchard
I happen upon, where it seems as though
the Rapture has air-lifted the good farmer
and his customers up into a mountainous range
of clouds, leaving behind this littered
grassy harbor at the side of the road.
I stop the car of course
and stroll and meander among abandoned
crates and bushel baskets domed
with butternut squash and apples, the way
I might wander a marina eyeing steepled yachts
with prettily altared bouquets and exposed living
rooms of the heavenly high life, as frivolous
as these pumpkins lounging in the field, perfectly
tufted and plush in rafty orangeness,
waiting to be the chosen, to pose as ghouls
or toothy goofs, thick, rich flesh and eyes
golden candlelit within. And over under a tree,
a grubby discard of apples on the ground, unhinged
and white where broken, fading to gray ferment
at the bruises where a fleet of yellowjackets fizzes
out the only sound, in full-out bingeing, mindlessly
enraptured, partying like there’s no tomorrow
or this or that life.
In a train
Never have I loved so well
the life given me
as when I was rocked
by the four o’clock train
from Chicago to Lansing in 1968,
the lap and arms of iron and steel
holding me, window-framed,
a vibrating twelve-year-old witness
to the dusky backside balconies
of yellow brick apartments
with Hancock’s black tower fading behind,
and I, eating the cool green grapes
my married sister packed, cold
fried chicken, a red and white
paper napkin tucked in a brown bag,
lumbering slowly past city windows
reflecting Magikist neon, where red-trim-
aproned women, the same
high-heeled secretaries I’d seen
on Michigan Avenue, were now fingering
the radio knob for jazz or polka while my train
lullabyed me home toward the small town
of my dull, window-gazing life,
but for a few minutes more, still here,
alone, humming along in the city.
Thank you, Dr. Larkin
Dr. Larkin
Dr. Larkin
Thank you, Dr. Larkin.
I sing your high praise
from Hoboken
to Interlochen.
O Coshochton, OH,
Have you heard of
Dr. Larkin?
He rescued my boy
who was bruised,
bumped and broken,
stitched him up fine
like a mama I reckon,
straightened the jaw,
set his teeth back to sparklin’,
called a friend, paid the bill
that was big enough to park in.
Hearken, hearken
all ye for Dr. Larkin,
a mender who’s there
but unknown and unspoken.
Is that your brother
building cars in Detroit, all stark in
the litter blowing back on itself, over
drunk homeless men, alive but unwoken?
You are me, Dr. Larkin,
mama, builder and poet,
you attend to our boys
from Hamtramck to Khanaqin.
Thank you, thank you,
thank you,
Dr. Larkin.
My beloved is unto me as a cluster of pokeberries . . .
As the goldenrod in the field glows like the sun, so my beloved's love is to me . . .
My beloved's lips are the color of the sumac blossom, and as soft . . .
You have stunned my eyes, my beloved, with even one of your lips,
red like the sumac leaf . . .
I have come to your garden, my beloved, and gathered your peppers, as colorful as the jewels of my temple, as sweet as flowers and as fiery as the days of our youth . . .
September morning
He’s tall as a tower, my son — graceful
in the resilient way
of bamboo, lithely connected
at joints and knuckles.
With guitar he eases out
a tune’s vulnerabilities, bending
fingers and strings as if not
bending at all, as if he were himself
the curve of wind on
a leaf ribbon,
tapping dew-riffs out of air.
Wind is the maestro,
we the geniuses who play
our one sublime
sound — tapering,
sometimes stuttering, ruffled
into harmonics, being blown
with the rest into a song untouchable.
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