Nor is it his own secret, the secret that was no secret to Mitra at all.
No, Hafez concludes, it is Mitra herself that keeps them apart.
Mitra, the lovely and delicate stone wall that
Stands between them and their vasal.
How unbearably noisy it is inside his hollow mind.
Was Mitra, this goddess of light and kindness,
Resurrected to reject the resurrected Hafez,
A terrible cosmic joke played by the Creator
Upon this ghost of a man?
Why was she eagerly saying yes until the moment she said no?
Is Pirooz correct?
Is she but a child, ready but not ready?
Layla, Juliet, Maria never said no.
Yet it is true that their yesses, and the fires they ignited,
Created the ashes of their tragedy.
Maybe Mitra is not wicked, or afraid, but merely wise,
As wise as he should be wise!
Hafez almost flees home to Pirooz’s apartment,
To drink whiskey and watch TV and forget;
Almost flees home to the Sonora to resume counting stars;
Almost flees home to Heaven to resume his eternal retirement;
But as he ponders the destination of his flight,
Rumi’s words come to him:
“When disappointed, I become encouraged.
When in pain, I breathe easier.
When I am ruined, I heal myself.”
And so Hafez whispers to himself:
“No matter how painful my misadventure becomes,
I could never leave Mitra!”
Now he begins to weep again, weep and weep.
He weeps for star-crossed lovers everywhere,
And for the lovers of one-sided loves, the most-difficult loves.
He weeps until his eyes are desert dry and desert red,
Until in his dreams he is a bull felled on the ground,
And Mitra is the god Mitra, her hands wielding a dreadful sword,
A curled Persian scimitar,
Wondering aloud whether to strike or not to strike.
His voice, now the voice of fate, screams to her:
“Strike at me, strike me in the heart, my blood will be the creation!”
Resolved, Mitra plunges the scimitar into his heart.
Blood spurting from his bull’s chest splashes the pearly ground
And forms into one of his own poems,
In his own hand, in the reddest of indelible inks:
Her lips dewy and her curls tangled
Drunk, giggling and singing,
Her blouse ajar—holding a jug of wine,
Her narcissus eyes sparkling and her lips alluring,
She slipped into my bed last night at midnight,
And brought her lips to my ear and whispered soulfully:
“Are you awake my grieved old lover?”
Horrified and bewildered, Hafez awakes to a black room and
Mitra’s melodic voice sliding through the cracks of the closed door.
Her words are also his words:
“Are you awake my grieved old lover?”
Not knowing if he is still awake or still asleep,
In the desert or in heaven,
Hafez rubs his eyes and then digs his fingernails
Into the fleshy end of his nose to illicit a telling pang of pain.
He is awake.
Now the door opens and Mitra enters,
Not with a scimitar but with a jug of wine.
The wine inside the jug is the same red
As the ballerina’s leotard that hugs her tight.
She sits on the bed and touches his chin.
“So Hafez Jaan—are you awake or aren’t you?”
Answers Hafez: “Dead or alive I have never been so awake.”
He reaches and gently combs her tangled curls,
And wipes the invisible dew from her lips.
And now, with Mitra’s smile in his eyes,
And with Mitra’s hand over his hand,
He softly touches her eyes, her nose, her chin and cheeks,
Her neck and breasts, her stomach and hips,
Her knees and her thighs, every inch of her,
The way a rolling breeze touches every curvaceous inch
Of the warm, firm and ready earth.
Hafez—Mitraist of old, Mitraist of new—quivers as he sighs,
Knowing now that the ideal lover of Hafez’s poems
Is now the real lover of Hafez the man.
Mitra quivers as he quivers, and sighs as he sighs,
Knowing now that she is not only the lover of Hafez’s poems,
But also the lover of Hafez the man.
She pushes him into his pillow and
Erecting a silken tent around his face with her hair,
Kisses him gently and long, as if he were a rose or a love poem.
Then with the intensity of a fresh raw fire,
She munches the poet and the poems at once.
Hafez draws her on top of him, his strong arms surrounding her.
He kisses her as she kissed him.
The thirsty lovers drink and drink and drink and drink,
Kissing all the kisses never kissed,
Sacrificing themselves with pleasure,
The way martyrs sacrifice themselves with pain,
For all the loves and lovers never fulfilled.
When finally their lips withdraw,
And they make up for the breaths they forgot,
Hafez laughs softly with the purest of joy.
And he sings the song that burned
Into his ears that afternoon in the theater:
“Tonight, tonight, it all began tonight,
I saw you and the world went away …”
They are the only lines Hafez remembers,
But Mitra remembers them all,
For she has visited the song, like Hafez’s poems,
Many, many times when alone so many times:
“Today, all day I had the feeling a miracle would happen,
I know now I was right …”
Mitra sings and Hafez’s hands explore.
He whispers desperately: “For the sake of God, Mitra,
This red skin you are in—this whatever it is!
There are no buttons anywhere, no laces or snaps!
How did you get it on so that I may get it off?”
Answers Mitra: “I know how to put it on, Hafez Jaan,
And I know where and when and for whom to take it off.
Be patient, my love, be patient.”
To which Hafez says: “I know I deserve to be tortured,
But this much torture is too much torture!
Do you wish me to be dead again, Mitra Jaan?”
“I don’t torture you to make you dead again,” she says,
“But to make you more than alive.”
Now she stands up and helps him stand up,
And guides him into the living room,
And sits him on the white leather couch.
“I am going to dance for you,” she says, retreating to the stereo.
“Stravinsky’s Firebird—have you heard of it?”
Hafez shakes his head: “Not unless this Stravinsky is an old Persian,
Or an old coyote in the desert, Mitra Jaan.”
She laughs, confidently, womanly,
And readies herself on the moonlit oak floor.
As she begins dancing to the pianissimo rumble,
She tells the story of the Firebird to Hafez:
“Once there was a monster, the most evil monster ever,
Who never died, who turned men into stone,
Who bound women with chains, just for the fun of it.
Under his rule lovers were thus kept apart forever.
“A wandering prince, lost deep in the monster’s domain,
Serendipitously encounters a beautiful Firebird.
Struck
by the bird’s loveliness, he steals a feather.
“The monster captures the prince.
But before the monster can turn him into stone,
And separate him forever from the maiden he loves,
The prince waves the magic feather of the Firebird.
The bird comes to him and helps him escape,
And tells him where to find the ogre’s secret of immortality—
An egg hidden inside a coffin.
“The prince flees, finds the coffin and smashes the egg,
Killing the monster and freeing its captives.
The evil cast over the land dissolves,
And the men of stone are turned back into men of flesh,
And the women are freed from their chains,
And happiness becomes a curious breeze,
And love flows into every heart.”
As Mitra finishes her story and her dance,
The thunderous musical jubilation impels her to leap like a bird.
Her swirling hair, playing peek-a-boo with her sensuous eyes,
Bewitches Hafez, but Hafez does not turn to stone.
He becomes as light and liquid as a bird himself,
And leaps from the sofa, and whirls as the Dervishes do,
And finishes in the arms of Mitra.
The dance, as Mitra intended,
Frees the two lovers from all prohibitions, and all inhibitions,
From the many monsters that had kept them apart,
That had kept them from their lovers’ dardedel.
If the jealous world would not give them permission to love,
Then they would take the world into their own hands.
Mitra slips from her leotard.
The earth, even the stars, tremble with delight.
She guides the suddenly shy Hafez to her bedroom,
Where a dozen white candles are already dancing,
Tossing sweet scents as if they were bridesmaids
Scattering the perfumed petals of roses.
She closes the door behind them,
Not to keep the world out, but to keep their love in.
Like a mother, she helps him to undress.
The naked virgin lovers stand at the foot of the virgin bed,
Catching their beautiful blushing bodies in a shy virgin mirror.
The mirror blushes back at them,
Filling their eager eyes with their own happy smiles.
The angels of love pour down from heaven and
Gather outside the bedroom door,
And press their ears against the door,
And listen as Hafez and Mitra pray together:
“You are my God, my supreme God,
You are my love, my supreme love,
You are my God, the supreme love,
You are my love, the supreme God.”
They hear Hafez and Mitra cry together, laugh together,
Hear their bodies struggling to become one,
Hear their screams of delight,
Hear their screams of accomplishment, their silence,
As they are lifted skyward on the powerful wings of their vasal.
The angels also cry, and also laugh, and also scream with joy,
And later as the spent lovers are touring the Universe,
They dance to the music of the “Rites of Spring,”
Hearing at long last these words:
“You are my perfect lover, Mitra Jaan.”
“And you are my perfect lover, Hafez Jaan.”
And then Mitra and Hafez hear the angels chanting:
“Happy vasal, happy vasal, happy vasal.”
Too soon morning brightens the room and awakens the lovers.
They untangle, shower together, and dress,
And go to the kitchen for breakfast.
This is not a morning for cold cereal!
Hafez makes orange juice from real oranges,
While Mitra scrambles eggs and toasts pita in the oven.
“What now?” Mitra asks as she lights a candle.
It is hard for Hafez to eat eggs
And fondle Mitra’s face at the same time—but he is trying.
“What now about the rest of today,” he asks,
“Or what now about the rest of our lives?”
“About the rest of our lives, Hafez Jaan.”
Hafez doesn’t want to shrug—to show Mitra he has no answers—
But what can he do but shrug?
“I suppose we must begin the rest of our lives
Right after we finish the rest of our breakfast.
I will hurry out before your mother hurries in,
So she will never know what we did,
So that when we get a chance we can do it again.”
Mitra does not like his answer at all.
“So instead of lovers we will be sneakers?
A pair of running shoes, lost miles apart?
Hafez Jaan! I don’t want us to be sneakers!
Romeo and Juliet were sneakers.
And Romeo and Juliet were failures.”
Answers Hafez: “We will be sneakers like them
But we will not fail like them!
Because unlike them, we already know their story.”
Mitra is not persuaded: “We will sneak and sneak,
Until we are caught, and then just like their story,
Our story will end on a stage slick with tears,
With a curtain of iron inevitability drawn between us.”
The eggs and the toast are suddenly too cold to eat.
Hafez catches his falling face in his hands, saying:
“You are right, Mitra Jaan,
We are just like them.”
Mitra strokes his hair.
“You give up quickly for a man who defies death.
Perhaps we should analyze our plight,
Not like sad, star-crossed lovers, but like scientists,
Postulating theories and then either proving them true,
Or poking them full of holes.”
Says Hafez: “If we are to be scientists, Mitra Jaan,
Then perhaps we should recruit Pirooz.
There is nothing he likes better than poking holes
In other people’s truths.
And perhaps we should include Rumi, too.
He is as wise as Socrates.”
Answers Mitra: “Let Rumi and Pirooz debate the existence of God.
Whether Mitra and Hafez are a complete pair of shoes,
And not just one shoe over here and one over there,
We will handle ourselves.”
And so instead of making love they go to Central Park,
Taking the bench they have claimed as their own.
Like scientists they ponder this question:
What common thing was it that doomed the other lovers?
Hafez begins: “Majnun was overwhelmed by his love for Layla,
Driven to madness by it.
Layla spent her entire life waiting in her tent
Hoping he would love her a little less,
So her father would find him more acceptable.
With Romeo and Juliet it was not a matter
Of too much love between them,
But a matter of too much hate between their families.
With Tony and Maria it was neither too much love
Nor too much hate, but simply too many differences,
Different kinds of vegetables in the same pot of soup,
Unable to mix since the broth was too thick with suspicion and fear.”
Having reduced the stories to their essence,
Hafez stares at the hungry pigeons staring up at him.
“I hate to say, it, Mitra Jaan, but I cannot find a common thread.
They are love stories but not the same stories.”
Mitra smiles at him, sadly, and taking his hands,
Says what she is afraid to say: “Hafez Jaan, you are right,
They are three different sto
ries,
But they are all played on the same stage.
That is what they have in common!
Tell me, my perfect lover, why didn’t Majnun take Layla away,
And live free and love free, moons away from her father’s tent?
Why didn’t Romeo and Juliet just run away?
Just for Romeo to remain a Montague?
Just for Juliet to remain a Capulet—just for that?
Why didn’t they just change their name to Macaroni
And live and love among the sheep in the mountains?
And Tony and Maria—what was that all about?
Didn’t they know there were tunnels and bridges
Linking Manhattan to the rest of the world?”
Hafez, excited, finishes her analysis:
“And Adam and Eve stayed in Eden,
As if there were no fruit trees over the horizon,
Where they could live and love
Without gods or serpents telling them what to do.
And I, Hafez the Timid, suffered in Shiraz,
As if Persia were only ten feet wide and ten feet long!
Yes, my sun, my moon, my brilliant flame of Zoroaster!
Those other lovers had only to join hands and flee.
Yes, they would be without the wealth of their families,
Without the comforts of their communities.
Their love would have been their wealth!
Their love could have been their comfort!
Who says two wild bees cannot
Make wonderful honey without a comb?”
And so Hafez rushes off to Pirooz’s apartment,
And gathers the money he has earned driving cab,
And Mitra rushes to her mother’s apartment,
And fills a suitcase with clothes and twenty dollar bills,
The guilt money her parents paid her as penalty for their absence.
And as the sun climbs to the top of the Empire State Building,
To balance like a ball on the building’s high beak,
Hafez and Mitra and the yellow taxi
Fly across the Queensboro Bridge,
And soar and soar, a pair of Firebirds on fire,
She free of her chains, he no longer trapped in his grave,
Across Long Island, ever east, ever away.
13 Flight of the Firebirds
And so ever east the Firebirds fly,
Ever east across Sunnyside, Forest Hills and Jamaica,
Ever east across Hempstead, Levittown and Massapeaqua,
Ever east across the ever-flattening hills,
The sun at their backs, the future in front of them.
Hafez watches the meter spin, joking:
“I hope we don’t have to pay for this.”
“We will have to pay,” answers Mitra,
“But even if the meter spins until it explodes,
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