July 2010: Los Angeles, “After the Rain”

Published in the A Year in Return: March 15, 2010-March 15, 2011, Journal

AFTER THE RAIN

I learnt with certainty that it is above all the mystics who walk on the road of God; their life is the best life, their method, the soundest method, their character the purest character; indeed, were the intellect of the intellectuals and the learning of the learned and the scholarship of the scholars, who are versed in the profoundities of revealed truth, brought together in the attempt to improve the life and character of the mystics, they would find no way of doing so; for to the mystics, all movement and rest, whether external or internal, bring illumination from the light of the lamp of the prophetic revelation. —Al Ghazali

These images are aimed at inducing a state of mind and being, which is referred to simply in terms of two imperatives: ‘detachment from appearances—abiding in real truth.’ To be detached from what appears is practically tantamount to realization of what never disappears, that which eternally transcends the real of appearances, ‘the real truth’. Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in the stream; A flash of lightning in a summer cloud, A flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream. This might be compared to such verses of the Qur’an as the following: Know that the life of the world is only play, and idle talk, and pomp, and boasting between you, and rivalry in wealth and children; as the likeness of vegetation after rain, whose growth is pleasing to the farmer, but afterwards it dries up and you see it turning yellow, then it becomes straw….               —Reza Shah-Kazemi

I. On Becoming Straw

And then she turned homeward
With one star awake
Like the swan in the evening
Moves over the lake
—from the traditional Irish ballad “She Moves Through the Fair”

Such is what I carry with me—
the wrongs I’ve done to others,
known and unknown, so far back

some of them are unremembered,
and others a moment of anger, of
confusion becoming never-ending.

I call upon those I have wronged
to receive me as the ocean
accepts the blundering flood.

I live with what I’ve done
on the path I’ve chosen,
which is different than yours I’m

Sorry
All of you who are listening to my words—
All above and all below—

I am near enough to hear
the dead’s voices inside the darkness
whose work here is not yet over.

No longer under the direction of the gods
I am responsible for everything I’ve done,
at the same time submissive to the Law.

I have broken every mirror—
for me now it is
light and darkness mixed together

but I know something
strange is happening,
something extraordinary.

 

 

II. Nearing the End (for Peter Kingsley)

To die before you die is to float
between the moon and a lake,
to stare into the sky until you can

see the nothing, not the stars,
the black where everything
that is hidden becomes clear–

what is left after everything
else has burned away–rising
into the nothing moments after

the dread angel comes for us,
turns us away from the living
for the Land of the Dead,

and we rush toward
the darkness as if we’re
going to be late—

and then I let go
and feel myself break free,
falling away from what I do not know
and by failing ending up
where I was headed anyway.

III. Not Knowing

I don’t know what’s
in store for me, but I’m certain
death is not the end—

the scene just shifts
from one darkness
into another.