“My God, my God, my God,” mumbles Pirooz again.
Rumi is perplexed by Pirooz’s reaction: “Professor, What is wrong?”
Answers Pirooz: “Fourteen is a forbidden age in America.
She is just a teenager, and a young teenager at that.
Messing with a teenage girl is a fast ticket to hell,
Even for a man who pretends to be as young as you, Hafez!”
“What hell can there be for loving a young woman?” Rumi asks.
“The hell of jail,” answers Pirooz. “For this is a different time,
With different beliefs and different laws.
The ready woman of your day is the radioactive child of ours.”
Hafez, angry and astonished, breaks his silence:
“God proclaims by creation, my ears hear it and my eyes see it,
That Mitra is grown and ready to be a wife and a mother.
And no prophet or holy book forbids her,
And nature compels her to love and be loved.
Why, Pirooz, are so many things so unnatural in this modern world?
So much more rigid and ridiculous than in the ancient world?”
Answers Pirooz glumly:
“Remember that once your ancient world was the modern world,
And the ancient rules enlightened rules.
Times change but little changes.
Islam, Judaism, Christianity, the old religions of personal salvation,
Have been shoved aside by national religions.
Even here in America, as free as any land, people are made
To march uphill with their pockets filled with rocks of repression.”
“Tell us more about this national religion,” Hafez demands,
So we’ll know if we are still permitted to breathe.”
Pirooz throws up his hands. “For what use?
I have been preaching about the national religion for years.
My American students regurgitate it back to me on tests,
And then crawl off to their star-spangled prayer rugs
As if having heard or learned nothing,
As if I were a gull squawking in a hurricane!”
Rumi chuckles: “We are all gulls squawking in hurricanes,
So go ahead, preach to us—we will listen to every word with care.”
And so Pirooz begins: “America’s national religion proclaims that
Columbus discovered the Promised Land,
Which, mind you, was already promised and already discovered
By others who had lived here for thousands of years,
Thinking it was theirs.
This Columbus murdered the Indians he found
And confiscated their possessions and their lands,
And collected their souls and gave them to Abraham’s God.
And then there was George Washington,
And his apostles, the Founding Fathers,
Who established the national religion,
With the Constitution as its scripture,
The Star-Spangled Banner as its cross,
The National Anthem—the holy hymn.
The Pledge of Allegiance the credo
The riches of the land became Heaven,
The assembly line, the poverty and the prisons—Hell.
The Almighty Dollar became Almighty God,
A God more responsive than Allah or Yahweh to almost any wish.
From the White House and the Capitol,
Prophets reveal new verses every day,
Through the modern Gabriel, the television set.
And the Supreme Court is the Holy See,
Constantly interpreting and reinterpreting the old and new verses,
Separating the innocent from the guilty,
As if the Day of Judgment was at hand.”
Asks Hafez: “So this national religion will condemn me
If I take Mitra as my wife, telling me she is not a woman,
But an invented species called Teenager?”
Pirooz nods. “In the eyes of the national religion she is still a child.”
Hafez is angry: “But the God of the Holy Books
Does not define Mitra as a child and she does not define herself as child!
What of Free Will? Am I also a child?
My Mitra has read more books than the learned of my times.
She speaks languages I never knew existed and
Visited more of the world than any of the great explorers of my time.
She could teach my worldly grandmother a thing or two
About the most sensuous and intoxicating things, Pirooz Jaan!
Damn all the clergies of all national religions, Pirooz Jaan!
They violate the laws of Nature with their man-made rules.
They suppress the joyful flames of desire with their man-made rules.
They gag and tie willing men and willing women
To invisible posts in the town square with their man-made rules,
So people can’t touch or talk, but only see and yearn!
What instruments of torture are these man-made rules?
I say to hell with these man-made rules!”
Rumi is sympathetic: “What a waste, these crushing rules!
This modern world, from what little I have seen of it,
Is a complicated, contradictory, and incongruous place,
Looming with possibilities but brimming with obstacles.
It coddles some with its luxuries and miracle drugs,
Causing them to remain babies inside,
Even as they grow older and older outside.
Meanwhile, it coarsens others with brutality and neglect,
Forcing them to mature faster and faster, aging them fast.
What an injustice it is to treat babies as adults and adults as babies.
And worst of all, in this modern world it seems that
The best seeds are not planted in the best gardens!
The worst seeds have the power and the best seeds the ideas.
Ideas flower ultimately, but only over the graves of their creators.”
The apartment is filled with a Sphinx of silence.
Finally Pirooz breaks the silence,
Agreeing with Rumi that, “Yes, the new world is a tough place
To be in love, and to be loved back,
Especially when loyalty is so scarce.
Our machines have ground the ancient mysteries into pulp,
Our medicines have diluted our pain yet also our passions.
The only true love permitted today is the selfish love of self,
So that we, like drone bees and dumbwitted ants
Will work and work and buy and buy
As much as we possibly can until we die.”
Pirooz’s pessimism makes Hafez shiver.
“But professor,” he asks, “haven’t you ever been in love?”
This makes Pirooz smile a little, then frown a little,
And run to his bookshelves for a shoebox full of letters.
“Yes,” he says, “her name was Iraan,
The same name as our homeland.”
He fishes through the box, retrieving a particular letter
Written on raspberry-red paper.
“I wrote this poem to her the night cancer stole her away.”
He unfolds the letter, straightens it respectfully, and reads:
“Iraan, Iraan, Iraan Jaan,
Where are you? Iraan Jaan?
Have you not heard my voiceless cries?
That my bed without you is nothing, yes nothing,
But an enormous emptiness that grinds me down
With the savage teeth of loneliness?
“Iraan, Iraan, Iraan Jaan,
Have you not heard the drummer’s crazy dance inside my heart?
Whenever I imagine your footsteps behind the gate of time
That scream out in scarlet: ‘Don’t you ever stop!
Come and fill me, too! Come and fill me, too!’?
“Iraan, Iraan, Iraan Jaan,
If you haven’t seen the flames of my indefatigable love for you,
Then surely you have been journeying alone, yes alone,
To distant places and loveless times.
I am going to weave a net, Iraan Jaan,
As extensive as all imaginations combined,
And cast it into the future to capture all the years unborn,
Before they speed away with you and me still apart.
“I’ll find you, Iraan Jaan, where the blue sky and the blue sea
Become the same seamless world
And the setting sun baptizes all worlds.”
Hafez feels himself feeling better,
Feeling hope, that there is still hope for his love, and for all love
In this mad and mean modern world.
“Was this Iraan your greatest love, Pirooz?
This woman who inspired you to write with such deep emotion?”
Pirooz folds the letter and slips it back into the shoebox.
“If she was, I will be grateful and satisfied,
For Iraan was truly wonderful.
But I still hope, dear Hafez, that my greatest love is yet to come,
That my ultimate love is still hiding like a goddess in my mind.”
“Ah,” sighs Rumi, “tell us about this love.”
For this love Pirooz does not need words already written.
These words are already written in his heart.
He closes his eyes and recites:
“Surrounded by parched grass and withered roses,
While the sun gazes at my loneliness with its burning eyes,
I wish a miracle, for my perfect love to emerge and
For the blue sky to rain happiness on us.
“But my loneliness is thirsty, too!
It gazes at me and sips my imagination,
Thought by thought, demand by demand.
Yes, destructive as a one-sided love,
Vicious as all the enemies of mankind combined,
My longings suck my spirit dry, drop by drop, ache by ache.
“Now I see a white dove against the dead blue-black sky.
I become attached to the dove, hoping it brings
A message from my imaginary love.
But soon, too soon, the dove is gone,
Except for my expectations which, like a feather, it has left behind.
And so my longings rush back like a betrayed lover,
Glowering at me and raging at me with a blazing gaze.
“I run from those glowering eyes.
I run from the eyes of my own demanding mind,
Staring at me in the mirror of my mind, asking:
‘Where is the perfect love you keep in your mind?’
And I run also from the crowds,
Which only accentuate my loneliness,
Until I descend into the valley of despair.
And even as despair renders me blind,
I still look for the one I’ve lost before she could be found.”
Hafez nods: “This perfect love you lost before you found
Is the same perfect love I sought for centuries,
And have just now found in the backseat of my taxi—
My most-perfect Mitra!
So there is still hope for you and your perfect love, Pirooz Jaan.
Be content with God’s will, his plodding and difficult terms.”
Pirooz bristles: “You want me to praise God
For keeping from me the love that makes me whole?
If anything, I should yell at him,
‘What are you waiting for? Hurry up!’”
Pirooz’s outburst both surprises and delights Hafez.
“There is no need to yell at God, at me, or anyone else.
‘God’s will’ is just an expression.
I was merely telling you to be patient.”
BOOK TWO:
Poem of Poems
8 The Poem Of Poems
Saturday dawns,
Causing true Manhattanites to yawn and stretch and rejoice
That the busy bridge-and-tunnel people
Won’t be coming to the island today.
Yes, on Saturday the city transcends its weekday fanaticism,
Becoming a small and wonderful town.
Pirooz fixes Rumi and Hafez an American breakfast,
Pancakes and scrambled eggs, and suggests to them that,
“Today would be a good day to do nothing.”
And so the professor and the two poets set out to do nothing:
They sit in the basement laundry room reading old magazines
While the machines spin and goosh,
Hafez reveling that people today
Fold their sheets exactly as they did a thousand years ago;
Then they go upstairs and sit on Pirooz’s long sofa and watch TV,
Giving each channel just seconds to impress them
Before they click to the next.
They nap, the snores of one drowning the snores of the others,
So that everyone is able to sleep.
Finally, when they have completely run out of nothing to do,
They stand side-by-side at the window, magpies on a naked limb,
Looking ten floors down to Riverside Drive,
And the park sloping down to the highway,
And to the Hudson River flowing beyond.
It is all so big, it is all so small.
The trucks and cars are cats and mice,
The boats, bobbing seagulls, the barges, runaway twigs.
The people are but wingless sparrows,
Hopping this way and that, everywhere.
The treetops seem as close to the ground as the grass,
The mighty Hudson looks no bigger than a brook.
Says Pirooz of the view: “This is the work of a perfectionist painter,
Who forever modifies his unfinished works
With new hues, shapes, minds, and sounds,
One day hiding the sunlight with dark clouds,
The next day dispersing them with one brush,
To reveal the moonlight and the midnight.
One day the painter spanks the summer trees with rain,
Only to change his mind the next,
Dipping the green leaves into psychedelic paintpots,
Letting them dance to the disappearing ground.
Then he changes his mind again
And sugars everything with chill,
One day he paints the sky Plato’s perfect blue,
The next he dulls it with the kaleidoscopic fumes
Spewing from those factory facades,
Jig-jagging like broken teeth on the New Jersey shore.
Yes! This is the work of a perfectionist painter
Who mixes the inventions of man with the inventiveness of Nature.”
Rumi asks Pirooz: “And just who is this masterful painter?”
Pirooz protests with a smile, saying,
“Rumi Jaan, I thought we were going to do nothing today?
If I answer Science, you will answer God,
And we will do nothing today but argue.”
They watch a carefree girl chase a carefree balloon.
They watch a bus cough to a stop, spitting out a row of dominoes.
They watch a plane fly low enough to catch a fish.
“What a strange gallery this is,” Pirooz says.
“We stand still while the paintings march by.”
Hafez replies: “Then let us take some wine and food,
And rush to the river and become part of the painting.”
“The river is dead,” Pirooz informs them glumly.
“But we are not dead!” Rumi and Hafez respond together.
The three Persians pack a picnic in a hurry and
Crowd into the cranky elevator and descend into the painting.
They cross Riverside Drive—disregarding the horn blowers—
And trot down the stone steps into the park.
They pass a playground brimming with laughter,
Pass empty green benches and an ice cream vendor’s
Mouth-watering, ring-a-ling bell.
They tiptoe across the dangerous paths of rollerbladers,
Smiling at two lovers locked in each other’s arms.
They pass stray dogs barking and weary beggars begging.
They pass an underpass and march on toward the Hudson.
A muddy path leads them through a swath of yellowy weeds,
Toward a huddle of boulders.
They encounter beer cans and broken bottles, single lost shoes,
Hamburger wrappers clinging to thistles,
Rotting tires that once rolled along on highways,
Discarded bricks once the pretty face of a millionaire’s home.
They reach the boulders and carefully step over them,
As if they were balls of burning lava.
Hafez is heartbroken.
From Pirooz’s window these boulders
Appeared to be the guardians of truth and beauty,
Whose sturdy backs one could perch upon
And admire Mankind and Naturekind,
As they mixed and melded and flowed in harmony.
But now he sees that these boulders are only pallbearers,
Carrying the dead river on their shoulders,
In a sad and somber funeral procession,
Just as the deep river carries the ghosts of dead fish.
The funeral march is accompanied not by a somber dirge,
But by rock-and-roll blaring from passing cars.
The path is not decorated with the petals of roses,
But colorless poisons disgorging from the sewer pipes of modernity.
Hafez cries out: “It all looked so magnificent from above!”
“Modernity from a distance is very pretty,” Pirooz answers.
“But up close it can be deadly, especially if unchecked—
A rabid beaver devouring the evolutionary tree.
Man used to fear Nature but now Nature must fear Man.”
Rumi suggests they should go back to Pirooz’s apartment,
Saying that, “Paintings always look better from a distance.”
But Hafez shakes his head. “Mowlana, if this is a funeral,
We need to stay and mourn.”
So the three Persians, though filled with grief,
Open the wine and fill up their paper cups, and drink and drink,
To drown the bittersweet taste of modernity.
Mumbles Pirooz: “I wonder what the river thinks of Man?
What the witnessing stars think of Man?”
Rumi looks up at the crimson clouds and squints, and listens,
Thinking he can hear the river’s whimpering cries
Dardedel Page 8