Sunday, March 27, 2011

Tripping Over Joy: You and Your 1000 Serious Moves

Tripping over Joy
by Hafez (Sufi poet, circa 1350)

What is the difference
Between your experience of Existence
And that of a saint?

The saint knows
That the spiritual path
Is a sublime chess game with God

And that the Beloved
Has just made such a Fantastic Move

That the saint is now continually
Tripping over Joy
And bursting out in Laughter
And saying, “I Surrender!”

Whereas, my dear,
I’m afraid you still think

You have a thousand serious moves.

I am indebted, for this poem, to Brother Joe Kilikevice, of the Shem Center in Chicago, and the two dozen-plus men I spent this past weekend with on a Male Spirit Retreat.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Take Up Your Mat and Walk: The Paralytic's Friends

The Paralytic’s Friends
(Luke 5: 17-27)

It was murderous hot
And they must have had it about up to here
With hauling this guy around
On a mat.
But you know they loved him too,
They must have been friends from back in the day.
One of the five—it is always this way,
In your age or ours—has had all the bad luck.
Divorce, debt, and a stupid streak
That overcomes his better lights,
And now he’s just decided
Not to get up.
You might almost think it’s another joke—
He was always the clown—
Except that he’s gone quiet too, all shut down and sad.
The four friends want him back on his feet,
They’ve tried this and that. Dear God!
The snake oil guys that roamed the earth
In those days, a craze or fever,
Every third fellow claimed to be God,
As if earth itself, nervous at what it knew was in store,
Coughed up a swarm of lunatics.

So they’d heard about this one, and rolled their eyes.
But there were the crowds, and more than that
Was how they walked away amazed,
And when they spoke could only say
 “This we have never heard before.”
And as for me, I’d been following too,
Waiting for what I couldn’t tell,
Recording the tremors at every stop.
And here I was in the back of the house, 
He had just begun to speak,
When the roof began to crumble,
Dirt and straw and whatnot coming through.
There was a terrible din and the children laughed,
The old lady shouted and shook her fist
And a local curmudgeon was covered in dust.  
The patch in the roof was lifted off
And in came the torturous sun
Then a shadow followed by
The mat coming through.

No one later could quite agree
Exactly what got said.
Much later, when the torpid spectacle had made the rounds,
Caressed by every broken hearted gossip,
It came down to this:
“Your sins are forgiven.”

This may be true, for all I know,
For who would not rise up,
Freed like a spring from its contraption,
From the cage of yesterdays and ancient wrongs,
The slag run-off of time and its regrets
Or hopes squandered like a drunkard’s coins,
The weight of all that past leaning in
And down on the joints of now,
On the crick in the neck, on the bone that cracks?
Who would not rise up
Were that stone rolled back
And the past revealed as an empty tomb?

Ten thousand, thousand shrieking suns
Have risen and sunk since that blasted day
When a flock of pigeons clattered up the sky
From the soot of the crumbling roof
And the crowds came and went
In the ancient clay.
Take up your analytic couches and walk!
Into your own dull daylight
Of rusted plumbing
And everything falling apart,
Take up your life as you would an ailing old friend
Whose hinges are off, whose limbs are unstrung,
Hoist him up—
Crafty, resourceful, shrewd to the end—
And walk.

Regret Nothing...not the nights sunk like a dog in the living room couch chewing your nails

One of my dearest friends, and the wisest individual I know, sent me for my 51st birthday a batch of poems. How does she know so well what would speak to me? Here is one (I'll share more). God, I needed to hear this.

"Antilamentation"
by Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read

to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering
any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.