"Ana al-Haqq" ("I am God") the Sacrilegious Sufi Sang in 922 AD

The dirt street his drum,
he thumped it with foot and thumb.

“Look, he’s dancing in his chains,”
local moralists complained.

Tortured with blades, head soon to be cut off,
he listened to his critics scoff

as he dissolved into the sky,
which floated, blue with clouds, in Allah’s eye.

Now every time Allah winks,
al-Hallaj peeks out and weeps for those who think

the discipline required for salvation
entails obedience to rules, not a focused magination.

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Qur'anic Meditations

for Don and Martha Palmer

"Your father was not an evil man and your mother was not unchaste"

1 (Sura II, Verse 25)

It's morning, but why?
The mind, a bee buzzing near a hyacinth
in the midst of nonexistence.
The light, a yellow tweezers, yanks out
first my eyelashes, then, one piece at a time,
the lids themselves.
My eyes are naked now.
Outside, in the empty mailbox on the post,
absence is itself a letter with a stamp on it.
I get out of bed.
On the windowsill, a ladybug,
body of fire with a few dark cinders on it.
Allah's always telling parables,
even when they're insect-sized.

2 (Sura CXIII, Verse 4 and Sura CXIV, Verse 5)

The prowler, gesturing soundlessly
outside my window, wears a hooded parka.
I close my eyes and hear a homeless hag,
the one I saw two days ago near the bus depot,
blowing, as if into an instrument,
into a twisted reed by the Christina River.
I want to go back to sleep, but can't,
since there the pay-phone on the empty street
rings -- a message from where? -- in the silence.
I look around.
Only yesterday it snowed and now . . .
A follower of syllables, I go nowhere.
My breast is the window at which the vagrant mime mutely shouts hooray.
Elated by his promises,
I got drunk yesterday.

3 (Sura XCIX, Verses 1-4)

Far away
not just the bougainvillea's branches
but also the buildings tremble;
the Richter scale hits nine.
Like thoughts you don't want to have,
boulders rise from where the ground splits open.
"What's going on?" fleeing people scream.
Is that Iblis, with a goatee from which dangle
eel heads while mommy imitates
a belly-dancer on a stage in an Eden festering
inside heaven’s secret hell?
Crowds listen as the Dark One itemizes
each stolen acre, each molested child.
Only those who run away, their knowledge a reflection
of the stones' simplicity, survive.
With Allah speaking in his ear, Mohammed
prophesied it would happen:
only when the mind’s wiped out does crazy sanity begin.

4 (Sura LXXVIII, Verses 18-26)

Hung over, I reject her advice
and listen to the mullah instead,
each word a picture in my head.
Like a human chest sliced open by a surgeon,
the sky's ripped asunder, a gaping hole
in and out of which clouds float,
Allah's heart's entrance.
"Not For You," a sign says.
The nearby mountains, an alphabet invented
by someone who left long ago.
From every angle, now, hell waylays the unbeliever
as I wait, young again, in the asylum.
Each day, when the brain-doctor smiles,
I flee across the lawn,
slam my body against the exit gate and proclaim
I’m healthy now!”
The gate never budges, not an inch.

5 (Sura II, Verses 66-70)

In daylight, a drunken man falls asleep in his bed.
He awakens in the dark, then conks out again.
Later, a nightmare rouses him
in morning brightness.
Although he doesn't know it, his pounding head
rests on Allah's lap.
He falls asleep again while imagining a cow, its hide
covered with the scars of ancient injuries.
Just west of Gander Hill Prison, the cow nibbles a tiny lawn.
From behind, a cop shoots the cow, after which
the cow turns around,
Abraham's shrine shining in its eyes.
Wherever the cow is, Mecca's always close.

6 (XCV, 1-2 and XCVII, 1-5)

As snow blew over the bay where Owen drowned forty years ago,
the plane took off for far away.
In customs, they searched my suitcase
for a bomb or a riddle to thrill them.
Later, traveling with a few camel-riders, I saw
first a fig orchard, then an olive grove.
Mt. Sinai was near.
While fasting, what I ate
was an emptiness bigger than existence and its absence.
In my heart, I rose to heaven then.
The giant sky was so shallow that when I stepped in it
no blue doused my toes.
I simply was --
each thought, repeated more than once,
was a quiet night that lasted years . . .
I can hardly remember this now.
Too hung over to count my fingers
or find my nose,
I am the nowhere outside of what Allah is. Even worse,
I am the Allah outside of which
sprawls the nowhere that I'm not.

7 (Sura XIX, Verses 15-25)

Unable to think straight or adhere
to rules, I'm saved by what disgusts:
I never saw a mutilated piece
of human flesh I wouldn't kiss
or a torturer whose skull I wouldn't crease
with a pickaxe if I had to.
Believe me, jihad's not a war cry
but a defiant dance life-celebrators do
in spite of nightmares.
Each dancer is like a pregnant woman who,
fatigued by movement and strained mirth,
finally falls to the ground in labor, cursing heaven.
In response, Allah feeds her dates as she gives birth.
The next thing we know, here's Jesus,
then the rest of us and the placenta.
Mary eats another date, sniffs some fetal mucous,
then nods off while studying the evening sky, a rare magenta.
The palm tree beneath which she sleeps
and the stream washing the pebbles near her ankles
and the boulder upon which the lizard creeps,
all are here in the oasis.
                                         Soon it's night.
                                                                   The desert breeze is gentle.

Tonight, at least, we'll know no harm.
Newborns, we sleep in our mother's arms.

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Liberation

Willie Two Fingers knows where he is and was, the things he’s seen.
The arrowhead unearthed at Twisted Point.
A skull fragment found north of Volker’s farm.
The dog racing after a windblown paper scrap
across land that stretches to an edge no one can get beyond.
Back east, once, Wilema walked among the sugarcane at dusk,
then later, in a cabin behind the Big House, stuck pins
in a dolly’s flesh while biting her lip until it bled.
Why did Master’s little Jenny play piano
while her own Serena groaned in the crib
until the magnolia flowers’ silence became the crow
that stole the baby’s mind and gave it to the sky?
Like bitterness or joy, that elusive, Willie Two Fingers was long gone by then.
She tried, but couldn’t count the other disappeared.
Brother Samson lived in Haiti and . . .
She once saw a painting of naked Adam, lolling about in Eden.
Surrounded by vegetation, the simpleton
didn’t have it in him to rebel when God decreed expulsion.
When, seeking Eve, the snake slithered
under a coverlet of flowers, Wilema cheered, knowing, at last,
their reason for existence.
After Eve bit the apple, Wilema viewed, in a vision,
every unmarked grave in the nation, and heard the moaning
of each resurrected Indian and slave.
Willie, the runaway, wasn’t coming home again
and neither was the Lamb, eaten by bacteria on the cross.
Far from being a loss, his absence
was the hole through which Wilema wanted to pass.
She did and, when she did, she did it with a laugh.

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The Chaos of Simplicity

Rest is impossible in the house where I grew up.
The crippled woman limps up the stairs, behind a man whose eyes
are chutes down which coal-lumps rumble in Yonkers, 1906.
A dog urinates on a bush outside the grocer’s across the street.
What street? Where I lived as a boy, or where daddy lived as a boy?
The images are out of place, or maybe not.
Seated at my childhood desk, I listen, like an astrophysicist
interpreting static from a far galaxy, to what the wood doesn’t say.
Meanwhile, Federico eats a mango inside the bodega. Windblown snow
piles up on the apartment building’s steps. Joshua
blows a horn while Jericho’s walls of melody crumble
and a wilder tune is spawned by the rubble.
I hear the dying scream, then Sierra Leone’s sandstorms
clog their mouths and Horace, a Brooklyn junkie
seeking solace, reads the Qur’an, Sura 2, stopping where it says,
“Guard against the Fire whose fuel is men and stones.”
Unable to rest, I’m on the move.
Not far from Yemen, I butcher the first camel I see, preventing Iblis,
with his moneybags, from riding it through a needle’s eye.
On E. 10th St., I climb the walkup’s stairs, knock
on 4-A and enter when Missy whispers, “You’re here at last.”
Inside, one small table lamp is lit. Sitting on the sofa,
I peek into the tiny kitchen, a giant ballroom.
In it, Buddha and Jesus tango to an orchestra of screams
only the true revolutionary hears.
When the slowly dying rise, that’s when God will appear.
This is my epiphany: love is. And rage is part of it.
The Savior watches as the resurrected stomp the tax collector’s face,
then, in a chaos of sorrow and glee, beg for forgiveness and praise.
What a second coming -- wonderful, but in complete disarray!
The four horsemen prophesied by John are thrown by their steeds
into a lake of inertia, where the ex-riders splash wildly, then
fall asleep, drowning in their dreams, those apocalypses created
by stymied egos on a night when they bet what was left of the cross
on one roll of the dice and lost.
“John met ‘em at a Trump gig in Atlantic City,” a fellow disciple gripes.
“What about the flowers?” someone asks.
“After my moms died, her petunias raised me,” Mickey from Nebraska replies.

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Gautama Near Jivaka's House 600 B.C.

        1
        The birds’ absence. A hut. And over there
        the boulder. Each

        propitious. Even
        the mundane graces us with deepened sight:
        the sun grows on the pond’s shoreline, a white

        lotus floats in sky.
        The senses’ chaos, the only structure. Cow dung decays, as does the field in which the cow dung lies, and also our memory of what the field looked like years ago when we were younger and had

        stronger eyes.
        And from this sprouts
        the longed-for:
        meaning’s end, the birth of light.

        2
        The wind blows near Jivaka’s house. Leaves scrape across the roof, but make

        no sound.
        Later, however: voices. Like an underwater swimmer coming up for breath and finding himself warmed by sunlight, the meditator

        opens his eyes.
        Villagers stand around him, their lips smeared yellow with mango pulp. Amused by this, he mutters something. His mouth’s a quagmire of sound, a stormy wildness, nothing he says

        makes sense.
        The listeners turn away.
        With his mind, he touches a woman’s cheekbone, then slides

        toward a cloud over there.
        From his abysmal throat the first waters evolve, then the starry systems, then beings, and finally

        the tree under which he now sits.
        Still, people suffer, the dying cry out, children weep.
        Again, he opens

        his eyes.
        Is it a minute, or a week, or even a month later?
        He is someplace.
        Where?
        A nowhere
        more here than here is.

        3
        The people are sad, so he tells stories.
        One is about a poor man who locates a dead mouse on the road, then sells it to a tavern-owner as food for the tavern-owner’s cat.
        Another is about a dwarf who saves a king’s life after the king’s protector, a brawny braggart, panics and shits in his pants while riding an elephant into battle.

        The listeners laugh, as does the storyteller, who suddenly rasps

        “The dead mouse on the road’s my spiritual brother,
        as is the poor man who knows how to hustle a penny,
        and I’d certainly rather be a goodhearted dwarf
        than a scared bigmouth who squirts shit from his fanny!”

        After much hooting and shouting,
        the people organize a party
        at which everybody’s happily quiet
        and there is no food or drink.

        4
        Like a pond fed by an underground spring,
        the evening light deepens.
        The Brahmin priests, seated in their temples, gorge
        on lentils cooked with purified butter.
        As they eat, they acknowledge their god, Vishnu, petting
        his statue as they might pet a house dog drooling for love.

        Here, in the open air, no gods,
        just the open air itself, a nothingness
        which appears to be something, but isn’t,
        or, if it is, it’s a different something
        than what we think it is.

        Under the peepul tree, Buddha silently thinks.
        His muteness mocks the linguists, who want to know
        “Do words exist?”
        Pain does. And suffering. And illusion,
        which is, and also isn’t, this.

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Uncle and Friend

When “Rodent” Mueller met Hassan years ago
in Brooklyn,
they ate sardines and onions, spilt beer
on the floor and swore
that what they saw through the window
wasn’t a snow-buried railroad yard but a field of gooseberries.
“It’s spring!” Rodent, as drunk
as Hassan, bellowed while going to take a leak.

When Rodent died a few winters later,
Hassan showed up at the gravesite and muttered,
no one knew why,
an anecdote about a holy man choking in a cave,
then dropped, by mistake,
an unopened Lifesavers pack in the hole.
“Are you a dope or what?” Antonia, Rodent’s sister, shouted.

Then as now, the snow melted as if
relief was in sight.
It wasn’t and it’s not.

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I Haven't Seen Billy and Nina for Years

        Heat lightning north of the trailer park at night
        I sit in a lawn chair next to the pickup in the driveway.
        In Delaware Park the slot machines, quiet now.
        Lying in bed before going to sleep, the old man, barely able to move, snuggled his bony body in Jesus’s arms, then muttered something no human could understand.
        In an empty theater the talented musician says nothing as she strokes the grand piano’s dark wood.
        The other day after a rainstorm I walked in Brandywine Park along the river. Silty water gushed over rocks, an aging mind in the aftermath of a barely remembered turbulence, the past. I met no one I knew. The sky cleared. It was blinding.
        When the beetle eats the rose leaf, I close my eyes and memorize the taste.

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Destination

for S.

1
Across from the UAW hall, the old retiree, thinner
than the canopy rope someone hogtied Hoffman’s son with
the day he came clean after the union picnic that he was homo.
stands in April sunlight, talking to a woman.
“It’s yer ass they want now,” he laments gently,
his thinness like the afternoon light, almost bodiless but there.
But where’s “there”?

2
Wherever the sugarcane is, it’s not here.
Maybe Vimal, 6000 miles away, wanders a path
through the cane’s darkening green
after stopping at the Ganpati temple on Hindalga Rd.
Wings spread, a white crane rises from a further field.
A grandmother, hunched in a hut’s doorway, shells peas
while gazing at tree leaves shivering faintly in a hot breeze.

3
Bikers on their Harleys see, in the distance, a tunnel
that goes somewhere oriental.
The light at the end of it is a sunset hue.
They laugh, knowing it’s only a red forehead dot,
a target to aim at.
Midget U.S. flags on tiny poles
protrude from their bikes’ gleaming handlebars.
They slow to a halt and rev their engines.
She gets the message: they don’t like Asians.

4
The retiree, a skinny black, places his hand on her shoulder.
“They can go fuck themselves,” she says, envisioning
a cow near a valve factory in another country.
A bird sits on the cow’s back.
The bikers don’t come closer, hiding
behind their tiny flags.
What’s that, a few miles away?
Oh yeah, a spot behind her house.
The dirt’s feel in her hands is ecstasy.
All she wants to do is plant flowers there.

5
A Kanpur kid in pigtails. 1947.
On her street, a vacant lot, big as the imagination.
Weed stalks scrape her skinny legs
as she runs for the fun of it.
Mommy warned about the dangers.
A kilometer away, a knifed mullah bleeds a trail of silence toward a mosque.
Closer, a butchered Hindu baby hangs in air on the end of a homemade spear.
Years later, shipped to Copenhagen, she becomes
a housemaid, cleaning corners she never dreamed existed.
In one of them, a future her, huddled
in a Munich movie theater, grunts
when a Führer imitator sticks his finger in her cunt.
“Get lost!” she orders. “And screw planting flowers too,”
she thinks across from the union hall,
which is where she is, or isn’t, depending when you look.