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What Is, Is in Love (D-S6)

Like a moth circling a burning candle,
I love my friend’s face.
Give me your hand,
and nothing else.

If my body were dissected
joint by joint, my love
of my friend would leak
from elbow, wrist and knee,
and nothing else.

Before the clocks of creation
began to tick, God asked everyone:
“Am I not your lord?”
and like a choral symphony
we all replied in unison, “You are!”
and nothing else.

When the drums of that reply
are faintly heard, an echo,
then the friend is tested
by his enemy – he hears
and speaks of love
and nothing else.

By darkness, light. By light,
darkness. One drills down
for gems; and one looks up.
The kings and sultans, presidents
and ministers through all eternity
have long since turned to dirt.
But spirits descended
from every lover who ever lived
still walk the earth.
What is, is in love,
and nothing else.

Holy reverence to my father,
who told my teacher: “Give him
your hand and guide him
through love’s lessons,
nothing else.”

Like the windswept barren desert,
Majnun’s tears.
Nothing else.

If Mazun dies dirt-poor, no worry –
on his tomb write:
In this place lives love,
and nothing else.

No Idea (D-S5)

Whatever peace I had,
my friend has long since
boiled away.
I’m blind drunk
and reeling like a man
who stared too long at the sun.

I can’t tell the cup
from the wine from
the saaghi – they’re all
the same to me,
I’m so in love.

What I am
I have no idea,
or what I was before
I was,
what anybody was –
what we were before
we were
escapes me too.
I don’t know, even,
if I want to sober up.

I was carried, pushed and pulled here
on a web of roads I can’t remember
now, and never knew the reason.

I haven’t come to cause confusion –
this isn’t nonsense – I’m trying
to distinguish details.

I’ll keep calling Hu from here until I die.
“What is ‘life’?” I say, and
“What is ‘honor’? What’s ‘disgrace’?”

I’ll tend this garden ’til I die
and revel in the work.
That’s why I’m here.
Not to close the festival down.
If love’s a scandal,
what is it then, that holds
us all together, top to bottom?

I haven’t come to make this world my home –
I’m on my way to where I came from,
nowhere. Drunk I came and drunk I got,
and drunk I’ll go,
so soused
I can’t tell sweet from cyanide.

I haven’t come to sniff out every aster,
rose and meadow blossom one by one,
but be a nightingale to one enormous flower –
goldenrod, a form of sunlight,
maybe Queen Anne’s lace, a moonlight –
all one flower.

The gardener roars in vain
at the loss of a single blossom.
The nightingale, completely free,
illuminates the summer-yellow
field of flower
whole
with music.

I haven’t come to brood and sob.
I play my tar and sing.
Music’s my
intelligence, too bright to bear
the weight of sorrow.

“What is ‘sadness’?” Ma’zun asks.
“And what is ‘grief’?”