Dardedel
Page 4
Still, I felt like a foreigner in Shiraz, and suffered much in Shiraz,
But never found the courage to leave Shiraz, until death in Shiraz.”
When Hafez falls silent Rumi sighs with gladness,
Thinking that his companion’s sorrow is spent.
But as soon as he resumes counting, Hafez resumes his lament:
“I dissimulated, too, like Pirooz, so I know his pain.
Pirooz came to us, trusted us, opened his heart to us,
And welcomed us to all its chambers.
Now he needs us, even as prickly and dead as we are!
How can we refuse his invitation to save his life?”
Rumi wishes he had human feet, to pace away his frustration.
“We did save his life! Don’t you remember?
He went away determined to try again,
His belly filled with my milk, your umbrella shading his eyes.”
Hafez wishing he, too, could pace, reminds Rumi, that:
“We did not save him—we merely prolonged him!
Filling him, no doubt, with more doubts!”
Rumi suddenly feels top-heavy,
As if a nest of termites has nibbled away his rooty toes.
Finding nothing new to say, he relies on his own old adage:
“To rebuild an aging house, one must wreck the old edifice.”
Then he shrugs the way trees shrug, and asks:
“Did we succeed in spoiling Pirooz’s death wish?
As a first step to saving and revitalizing him?
Perhaps yes, perhaps no!
All we know for sure is that he is in God’s hands.”
“Rumi!” Hafez answers, almost in a scream,
“How can you say Pirooz is in God’s hands,
When either by His direct designs
Or the indirect design of His universe,
God put Pirooz squarely in our hands?”
“Please,” Rumi begs, “‘In God’s hands’ is only an expression.”
Hafez is suddenly serene: “Rumi Jaan, you spoke of doubts.
From this minute on I will defeat even doubts about doubts!
But there is more in my heart than just doubt,
For I am no longer resigned to never knowing
The secrets of Creation, as I was in the past.”
Exasperated, Rumi scolds his friend:
“You wish to know the impossible secrets of Creation, Hafez?
It seems you have forgotten my poem:
What could the dead soil know about the sun, about the light?
How could the created know the creation?”
It is Hafez’s turn to scold: “Remember, I am the one who remembers.
I do respect the old wisdoms, the old reasonings and answers.
But man faces new questions—so he must invent new answers!
Science is the way to truth now.”
The fault line under Hafez has shifted.
Rumi is the one quivering now.
“You really are beginning to sound like Pirooz,” he says.
Answers Hafez: “If I sound like Pirooz,
It is because I have touched the life in Pirooz.
And so my new life will have a new purpose.
I want to journey to where man has gone.
I want to journey to where Pirooz has gone.
To this new world I must be gone.”
Rumi gasps: “You want to follow Pirooz to New York?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Hafez shouts. “I want to go to New York!”
Says Rumi: “You are the mad Hafez,
My beloved Hafez, the everlastingly curious Hafez,
The conqueror of falsehood and hypocrisy Hafez,
The lover of freedom and truth Hafez.
Now you flick away caution as if it were a dead mosquito,
And thirst to gain the knowledge of this temporary world!
Why? Why?”
Hafez now looks deeply into Rumi,
As the bruised child looks deeply into his father, saying:
“I know it and I know it that Pirooz needs me in person.
Our old books may be of no help to him any more.
And, I confess, I need him in person, too, Rumi Jaan.
How much can I gain by reciting the Koran or my own Divan,
Neither containing the knowledge of modern times?
Even in death I refuse to be bound by irrelevance
Or the glorified past!
I know it and I know it that I must go where life has journeyed,
Where science and art and faiths and law have journeyed,
While we stood still, our feet bound in sand and death.
I must go before I cannot go, and as Pirooz has said,
I must wake up before I can never wake up.”
Rumi does not want Hafez to abandon him,
For he was abandoned once before by his beloved Shams,
The wandering mystic who wandered into his life in Konya,
The city where he taught and preached.
Shams had been searching for a perfect disciple,
And finding Rumi, knew that he had found him.
With Shams as his pir—his elder—and his guide,
Rumi became intoxicated with divine love.
He put aside his teaching and preaching,
Learning to write poetry, learning to sing,
Learning sama, the whirling dance, the Dervish dance.
He loved Shams. But then Shams disappeared.
And now Hafez wants to disappear.
Rumi wants to cry, as he cried for Shams.
But in death he has no tears.
So he says: “But I’ll miss you, Hafez.
Omar Khayyam, the bat who nests in my chest, will miss you.
How sad, the bat gobbles nasty bugs,
Pollinates plants, that so nourish people, and
Yet the ignorant believe he, the bat, is a bad omen.
Imagine a great gift of God thought by many to be the enemy of man.
How tragic, how sad—ignorance is Hell for those who know.”
Hafez smiles: “Yes, ignorance is Hell, I will say it again and again.
That is why I’m returning to life again,
To learn and to learn, again and again.”
Hafez feels a palpitation in his saguaro stalk.
He knows God has bestowed upon him a heart,
Fulfilling his desire for a new life.
He also knows that Rumi is hurting from his decision.
So he spreads his cactus arms, as if welcoming a new idea.
“Rumi Jaan!” he says. “Why not come with me?
We will look after Pirooz together, learn of man’s progress together,
Just as we counted the stars together.”
Rumi shakes his head wildly. “I cannot go! And you should not go!
Meddling in the affairs of mortal men,
With more than the words in our books,
Is meddling with God’s divine design.”
Hafez loves Rumi and does not want to hurt him.
Yet he knows he must journey to modern times.
“But don’t you see, God Himself is meddling!
He has just given me a jubilant heart, a heart agitated with desires.
Rumi Jaan, please, come with me to New York!
It is God’s wish!”
Rumi remains as silent as
All the other cactuses in the desert combined.
Hafez sadly hangs his green head and to Rumi says:
“I will miss you, I already miss you.
I will miss, and I already miss, Khayyam the Bat,
I will miss, and I already miss, all our desert friends.”
He now sees, for the first time ever,
Dew streaming down Rumi’s face,
And wishes for human hands to brush the drops away.
“Remember, Mowlana, these words of your own:
If your house sits on a treasure,
&nbs
p; You must wreck it before reaching the treasure.
But then, you must build a new house in its place,
Better than the one you had to wreck!”
Suddenly Hafez begins to dance and sing,
His legs still fixed in the sand but his arms
Moving in indescribable curves as if made of green rubber.
His lyrics fill the desert,
From the bottom of the sand to the top of the sky:
“Let us rise up and scatter flowers around,
And fill our cup with wine,
And tear and turn the world upside down,
And fashion a new order and a new life!
If one boasts of knowledge, or the other spews some nonsense,
Come and pitch their claims to the judgment of the ultimate judge.
If you desire heaven, then come to the tavern with us!
Then while intoxicated by love,
We will hurl you and bathe you in the Kosar,
The river that flows gently in heaven.”
“Yes, my beloved Rumi,” says Hafez, as he dances.
“The tavern I wish to visit now is called The Modern Times.
And the wine I wish to drink is the New Knowledge.
I want to know who this dear Pirooz really is,
Why he came to us, two prickly old cactuses,
And spoke to us with such love and admiration.”
Now Hafez swings his arms, faster and faster and faster still,
As he repeats the mantra: “I want to know, there is no sin to know.
Know the self, know the other, and know the world, Hafez.”
Suddenly Khayyam the Bat soars from his nest in Rumi’s chest,
And holds wings with a silver-white dove,
The reincarnated soul of the great Sufi poet Attar,
Who sucks the nectar of the saguaros and yet pollinates the saguaros.
Heavenly pearls of rain begin to fall, fall, and fall,
Seducing the Cristate Saguaros to spread their fan-like crowns
And jump and dance, and dance and jump.
Acacia and wild asters and the furry Teddy-Bear Cholla,
Having longed for rain for such a long time, join the dance.
An ancient volcano spews a smoky dance.
The docile Gila monster and its neighbor, the industrious pack rat,
Spin like the Dervishes, spin and dance and dance.
The humble Creosote plants, covering every valley, laugh.
A hill leaps like a giant happy drunk frog.
The mountain lion roars and begins to dance.
The rattlesnakes rattle their joy and dance.
The centipedes kick in unison their fifty pairs of legs,
And dance like Radio City Music Hall Rockettes.
Pursued by its own dust and its own enthusiasm,
The roadrunner dashes to the horizon to tell all the party is on.
Hafez’s resurrection, his joy of life,
His dancing and dancing and singing and singing,
And the giggling rain, giggling and raining,
Cleansing and bathing everything
For this magnificent birthday party thrown by God,
Transforms thousands of species, animals and plants alike,
Into a grand troupe of happy dancers.
They cry and laugh and celebrate a new life together.
And when Rumi turns to wish Hafez God’s speed,
Hafez already is gone.
And God for once unknots His thick knotted brow
And smiles a dazzling purple tulip smile,
And feels an un-godly urge to join the dance.
4 Education Of The Beast
Ten stories above Riverside Drive,
In an apartment shared with too many books and roaches,
Professor Pirooz tries to shower away his morning doubts.
But the soap and hot water are useless,
And the day will have to begin, doubts or no doubts.
He makes tea and toast, but touches neither.
He chooses a beret from his tree of berets
And unlocks the door’s seven locks.
He descends to the street and, head-down, heads
To the great temple of American aspiration
Called Columbia University, resting like a huge bowl of plaster fruit
Between hot, saucy Harlem and the cool leaves of Central Park.
Since returning from the desert Pirooz has tried so hard
To change his unchanging life,
To unstick himself from the mud of complacency,
From the mud of excuses, from the mud of despair.
He has changed from white bread to whole wheat,
And instead of drinking Sanka he now grinds his own beans.
And he has begun volunteering at an orphanage,
Reading funny stories to the children,
Children starved for a sliver of attention,
Children starved for a sliver of love and laughter.
He is even teaching some of them chess.
He has planted the seeds squeezed from a lemon.
And already they are sprouting in pots on his sill,
Reaching for the light outside
Just as their gardener, Pirooz, reaches for the light inside himself.
Yes, Pirooz has made so many changes since returning,
And yes, there will be so many more changes to come.
For one thing he is eager to find a new lover.
Maybe it will be the shy poetic brunette
Who sold him that yellow beret and Italian silk tie.
Pirooz has requested, and been granted,
A leave of absence for the upcoming term.
Already he is planning what to do with this gorgeous gift of time:
His plan is not to plan one single minute of this time!
His plan is to explore it and enjoy it,
Every serendipitous pleasure, every serendipitous trial.
Most of all, by not planning, he plans
To find that perfect poem hiding in his heart.
And when he finds it, and reads it,
He will be free at last from the prison called Profession.
He also has begun taking flying lessons,
To fulfill his boyhood dream to dance on the clouds.
His instructor is a woman, a former student of his,
Who threw away her books for the pleasures of the sky,
Who now lifts his spirit with or without a plane,
Who sits beside him, tempting his palpitating heart to soar
Higher and higher to both known and unknown places.
Already in just a few lessons he has noticed
That as she goads him to fly the little plane higher,
His own inner horizons are expanding,
And the irrelevant particulars of his grounded life
Are shrinking and shrinking, soon to nothing, he hopes.
He has noticed that as she commands him to descend,
To touch the runway, speed up and take off again,
That in his new life, he too, is doing much taking off.
To Pirooz, death now seems worlds away,
Books, lovers, flights, stories and poems away,
Beyond the horizons of horizons, the most awayest of aways.
Now his shoes take him between the Charles Keck statues
Of Letters and Scientia, to his classroom and his lectern.
When finally he lifts his eyes he no longer sees what
For too many years he used to see: rising rows of blank frog faces
Waiting to snap with sticky tongues the flies of truth that
Boiled from his dusty notes and tumbled from his dusty tongue.
Now he sees only ascending terraces of bright, eager frog faces.
“Where were we—if not everywhere?” he asks his students.
They laugh and he laughs and the class begins.
His day ticks away, each second lastin
g ten exciting seconds,
Each hour shrunken to one momentous minute.
Happy, full frogs hop away, eager, empty frogs hop in.
And all the time he is teaching, prancing about, flailing his arms,
He is also dreaming of seconds and minutes and hours yet to come.
At last it is three o’clock.
Pirooz, still busy in his day-dream world,
Hurries for the subway, for the No. 9 train south,
Which will worm-hole him through time and space,
Depositing him 100 blocks away in Greenwich Village,
Where he will drink too much espresso and play too much chess,
And perhaps debate something he knows little about,
With somebody he knows nothing about,
Until the afternoon and evening pass.
But as his foot dangles over the subway steps,
A voice vaguely familiar calls out from the rumbling street:
“Haleh shoma chetoreh, professor?” (How are you, professor?)
Pirooz withdraws his foot and twists,
Not noticing that the words are in Persian.
He squints at the smile inside the taxi revving at the curb.
It is a prodigious smile, a mystical smile,
Belonging to a man no older than twenty.
He is handsome, with dark eyes, mustache, and loose black hair.
“How about a cab today?” the young cabby asks.
“Why not?” Pirooz hears himself reply.
And so, seduced by a friendly face he has never seen before,
Pirooz trots to the cab and slides in.
“Greenwich Village?” asks the cabby.
“Yes, the Village,” stammers Pirooz with surprise.
The cab jerks and jerks and jerks, and enters the flow.
Without waiting for Pirooz to recover from the quake of his surprise,
The cabby delivers an aftershock:
“How delightful to find you in good spirits, Pirooz!”
Pirooz is indeed shocked: “How is it you know my job and name?
Did I scribble them across my forehead, perhaps?
And forget all about it, as I do other things, perhaps?”
The cabby grins, saying, “Your forehead is perfectly clear.
It is your memory that’s today unclear!”
The cab grovels beneath a red light and then growls away.
“What do you mean, unclear?” Pirooz asks.
The cabby is laughing now, enjoying his puzzled passenger:
“Only three weekends ago you asked me the very same question—
‘How is it that I know your name?’”
“Impossible!” protests Pirooz. “Three weekends ago I was not here.
Three weekends ago I was—”
The cabby finishes for him, laughing as he talks: