“Excuse me,” stutters Hafez as the man opens his door.
“You are not really Rumi, are you?”
“I am not even Persian,” says the man, walking away.
Hafez gives a ride to a woman with four little kiddies,
Licking her ankles like poppies in a breezy field.
She is dropping them off at daycare, she says,
To get to her job as a nanny for one.
He gives a ride to a middle-aged lady,
Who invites him to her beach house in balmy Key West.
She will show him the time of his life,
She promises, applying her makeup, all expenses, of course, paid.
“Is it because I’m too old for you?” she asks when he refuses.
“Madam,” answers Hafez, “it is I who’s too old for meaningless love.”
He gives a ride to two giddy teenagers,
A giggly boy and a giggly girl from some place in the Bronx.
They are too full of themselves, and too full of marijuana,
To tell him exactly where they wish to go.
Finally the girl says, “I want to fly high—
Take us to the Empire State Building,
Where the big King Kong caught airplanes like flies.”
So Hafez, flying in joy himself, his happiness in sight tonight,
Ascends the elevator with them,
Wondering just who this king named Kong was.
He gives a ride to an understudy actor,
Dreaming to star on the big Broadway stage,
Where he can make the big money and feel the big love,
And someday have an understudy just like himself.
As Hafez drives, the actor hums from West Side Story,
“Tonight, Tonight,” the song Mitra made true.
“May I join you?” asks Hafez, the actor says “yes,”
And together they hum all the way to Times Square.
And so the day goes, this longest of days,
Hafez ever happy, enjoying all his fares.
Finally it is seven, and the city is getting dark.
Finally he can turn on his OFF DUTY sign,
And rush to Pirooz’s apartment, to shower and scrub his teeth,
And put on the new Armani suit he bought for the occasion,
To impress Mitra’s mother and her very rich friends.
He is so happy, and so relieved,
That not a single one of his fares that day
Turned out to be Rumi, Gabriel, or God,
Checking up on him, warning him, whisking him away.
The night is flooding in but the day is just beginning.
Hafez in his new suit, his OFF DUTY sign bright as the North Star,
Heads for Mitra’s apartment
And the engagement party soon to begin.
As he presses the gas pedal his heartbeat
Keeps perfect time with the tar playing love songs in his head.
He barely stops for a red light when
An old woman with a face wrinkled as coarsely
As the bark of an ancient pomegranate tree,
Opens the backseat door and throws herself in,
Begging him to drive her home to The Bronx,
Before the dark gets any darker and the dangers slither in.
How can Hafez refuse this woman this simplest of requests?
This old and vulnerable woman who wants only to go home?
Who wants only to be safe for one more day,
Wants to climb the long stairs and lock the long row of locks,
And get in her bed alone?
How can Hafez tell her “No”?
And so he presses on the gas, journeying away from Mitra.
“I will only be a little late,” he mumbles to himself.
The bright lights of Manhattan fill the taxi’s back window,
The darkening horizon of The Bronx fills the front.
Each neighborhood is poorer, crumbling buildings, littered streets.
Chain-link fences surround empty lots, sidewalks beg for feet.
He finds the right building and drops the woman off,
Refusing her money but kissing her noble hand.
When she is safely inside he drives away.
It is good to be in love, good to be helpful,
Good to sacrifice a little of yourself for the world to be better off.
He feels suddenly silly in his new Armani suit
And wishes he had time to change.
Stopping for a red light, Hafez sees coming in the other direction
A car with its headlights off.
So he flashes his lights to alert the driver,
To prevent him from having an unhappy night.
The red light turns green and Hafez drives on,
Seeing in his rearview mirror
That the car without lights has made a dangerous u-turn,
And is now behind him, following closely.
“Now isn’t that strange,” Hafez says to himself.
The green light in front of him turns yellow, then turns red.
Though there is very little traffic, Hafez dutifully stops.
He needs no more trouble with the law, especially not tonight.
In the mirror he sees someone jump from that dark car behind him,
And walk toward him waving, smiling like an old friend.
So Hafez lowers his window, asking, “Are you in trouble?”
The someone pulls a gun and shoots him in the chest.
Now that someone runs back to the car, and screeches away,
Leaving Hafez alone, clutching at his emptying heart.
“Mitra! Mitra!” he screams, “I’m afraid I’m going to be late!”
As his blood drains away,
As his breath drains away,
His last words drain away, too:
Mitra, Mitra, Mitra, Mitra,
Mitra, Mitra, Mitra,
Mitra, Mitra,
Mitra
MITRA!
17 An Anguishing Fire
Rumi sits glumly in front of the TV,
While Pirooz rushes about, looking for his good shoes,
Unpinning the dry-cleaning tags from his suitcoat and pants.
Pirooz is furious with the old poet.
“How can you not go? You will hurt Hafez deeply.”
Answers Rumi, “He is hurting himself deeply.
Gabriel has warned him—and me—seriously.”
Pirooz, finally ready, gets a bottle of champagne from the fridge,
And combs his hair one last time in the mirror by the door.
“I will tell him you’ve caught another cold.”
Rumi clicks through several channels,
Choosing the one forecasting the weather in faraway lands.
“Tell him the truth, Pirooz, tell him that Rumi is meditating,
Trying to feel God’s will in his heart.”
So Pirooz closes the door loudly and descends to the street,
Hailing the first cab he sees.
The cabbie also is angry at something, pounding his fist on the seat.
“Something wrong?” Pirooz asks him.
“Another cabbie,” says the cabbie, “has just been shot and killed.
“An Eye-ranian guy—I think the news said his name was Hafez.”
The night gets darker and darker,
And Pirooz’s mind gets darker and darker,
Until he can neither think nor see.
Then his smoldering black emotions flash,
Engulfing him in an anguishing fire,
As rage and grief battle for his staggering soul.
Grief wins at first, but rage wins at last, and
He wishes he could dump all creation
Into a giant garlic crusher and swish!
“Damn it all, damn it all,” he repeats and repeats,
And joins the cabbie in pounding the seat.
Mitra hears the door knocking and runs to welcome
her Hafez.
But it is not her Hafez.
It is Pirooz, pale, shaking, barely able to stand.
“What is wrong?” she asks him.
Pirooz puts his arms around her.
His tears raining on her new yellow dress.
“Hafez is dead,” he whispers. “Our Hafez is dead again.”
As the party swirls and sings around them,
Pirooz tells Mitra what he knows:
“Police say that the killer most likely
Was a member of the Rattlesnakes,
The gang that initiates new members
With the rite of a random death.
A new member, it seems, must be a new murderer first.
So the Rattlesnakes drive the dark streets of The Bronx,
With hearts and headlights turned off,
Until a stranger flashes his lights.
Whoever cares enough to help enough,
Is coldly killed for being fool enough.”
And so the engagement party is suddenly a wake.
Fruity punch turns into bitter coffee, sweet cakes into moldy bread.
Colorful dresses darken until they are black,
Crepe paper streamers straggle like spider webs.
Laughing turns to weeping, mascara like molten lava runs.
Relatives and friends, not knowing what to say,
Can say nothing, nothing at all.
They can only surround Mitra, protectively, pathetically,
Like the grieving pillars that circle headless stone goddesses,
In the temple ruins of Persia, Greece, and Rome.
Mitra’s mother holds onto the shaken Pirooz and sobs.
Mitra speaks to no one.
Mitra cries to no one.
Mitra screams to no one.
She takes a napkin decorated with pink and blue balloons,
And with a tube of red lipstick writes a note to her mother.
It says: I’ve no words for this world, not any more.
And I’ll hear no words from this world, not any more.
For the sake of the child inside me I will continue to exist.
But do not expect me to mourn, or someday miraculously mend.
Emotion, of any sort, no longer exists for me.
Mother, family, friends, accept my silence and my widow’s face.
Mitra hands the note to her mother and then goes to her room.
She shuts the door softly,
Unplugs the TV and radio softly,
Unplugs the stereo, computer, and telephone softly,
Unplugs all interest in life softly,
Except for the little life stirring inside her softly.
Too many cold hours pass before her frozen tears begin to drip.
Like melting winter she weeps and weeps
A soundless, sightless, touchless farewell to the poet from Shiraz.
Like rainy spring her tears trickle into puddles, then into ponds,
Drowning the Field of Hopes,
Until all hopes are sliding mud.
Like scorching summer her loneliness burns and burns,
And the drowned field hardens into rock,
Rock that is too hot to tread, rock that is too heavy to bear.
Like the fading days of autumn her breath grows shallow
And she falls, falls, falls from her very real nightmare
Into a nightmare that seems so very very real:
The world is wrapped in a pitch black sheet.
Even the sun is black,
And the thick clouds shed tears of black tar.
The stars are the blood-black tips of rusted nails,
Sticking from a ceiling black with soot.
Uprooted trees are black, wilting flowers are black.
Blackbirds with broken wings hop
Across a smoldering gravel of the blackest coal.
Furry black animals—bears, panthers, wild boars, and wolves—
Hobble on broken legs and weep acidic tears
As big and as hard and as black
As the blackest beans of the jungled south.
Mitra sees herself amongst the filth, below a burning tree.
Suddenly one of the tree’s limbs becomes a noisy, coiling snake,
A rattlesnake, offering her an apple—at the point of a long black gun.
Mitra wakes in horror and finds sitting on her bed,
A bird as colorful as a bowl of fruit.
The bird smiles at her, a most emphatic smile,
And Mitra somehow knows that this bird is the Poem of Poems.
The magic bird hops forward, surrounds her with its loving wings,
And as if Mitra were her own little chick, whispers:
“Do, Mitra Jaan, what Hafez would do.
Journey into poetry and take refuge there.
Read poems, pray poems, cry and laugh poems,
Dream poems and endure with poems.
The music and meaning of poems are healing.
And write your own poems,
The poems called Mitra’s poems,
So that your tears crystallize into memorable poems,
So that your vasal lives forever in your poems
And your loss becomes creation.”
The Poem of Poems disappears
And Mitra takes the Divan of Hafez, and cuts out the pages
And pastes them on her bedroom walls and the ceiling,
Even on the ceiling and the closet door,
Until her room becomes the Divan,
So that from north and south, east and west,
Up and down, no matter what direction she faces,
Or her unborn baby faces,
They both can remember the one who remembers.
One by one the party guests leave, until only Pirooz is left.
He sits on the white leather sofa holding Mitra’s mother.
Like mourning parents their tears fall on their clenched hands.
She looks so sad, he thinks, so vulnerable, yet so self-assured,
So mature yet so young, so worldly yet so meek,
So refreshingly American.
He is surprised when she leans her head against his,
And surprised that when she cries, he cries, too.
She confesses that though she at first did not approve of Hafez,
She has—had—grown to appreciate him,
To love the vibrant, kind, and humble soul of Hafez.
Pirooz wonders if she knows that Hafez
Was—is—centuries old,
And not just the young cabbie Hafez,
Who stole her daughter’s heart,
But the old poet Hafez,
Who stole the heart of mankind?
Yes, Pirooz wonders this but does not ask Mitra’s mother this.
If Mitra wanted her to know, then surely she already knows,
And if she happens to know, then it does not matter now,
For she praises Hafez’s wisdom and creativity to no end,
His love for her Mitra to no end,
His laughs at his own human frailty to no end,
His cries for the frailties of others to no end.
It is dawn when she makes him a cup of strong coffee
And sends him on his way.
Pirooz runs the empty sidewalks, jay-running the empty streets,
Ignoring the red lights and DON’T WALK signs,
Reaching Riverside Drive just
As morning pigeons are flapping sunshine
Into the cool and gray Manhattan sky.
Pirooz had tried all night to call Rumi,
To tell Rumi about the horrible thing.
But Rumi did not answer, as he never answers,
Avoiding communication through cumbersome machines.
So Pirooz must now find the right words,
Even as his keys click open the many locks.
He calls into the dark apartment: “Rumi Jaan? Are you here?”
There is no answer, there is no Rumi
,
Just the meticulously made bed of Rumi,
And a meticulously written letter by Rumi
Fastened to the refrigerator with a smiley face magnet.
The letter reads:
Pirooz Jaan, I already know the tragedy of Hafez,
And my mind cannot bear his second death,
Or to witness the death in your eyes, and dear Mitra’s eyes,
As you mourn his passing.
Pray-tell professor, was it a senseless death,
Or does it, as I fear, make sense?
Did he die from the random bite of a snake,
Or was it God who bit him dead?
I have fled back to the Sonora, Pirooz Jaan,
Prudently perhaps, perhaps out of fear.
Either way, I already miss you,
And apologize for leaving you
You know that I love you.
I hope that this modernity of yours ascends beyond its pretensions,
And becomes truly modern.
I hope it rids itself of all bad gangs: bad gangs of rattlesnakes,
Bad gangs of bad businessmen, bad gangs of terrorists,
Bad gangs of bankers, moguls, and marketeers,
Seducing the innocent with the opium of self-annihilation.
I hope this modernity of yours
Rids the world of bad gangs of bad politicians,
Bomb makers and flag-waving buffoons,
Bad gangs of bad holy men, the bad guru gangs of self-improvement,
Clothing designer gangs and gangs of thieves,
Bad gangs of bad scientists who abuse science for glory and profit,
Poets forever writing the same old poems,
Artists forever painting the same vase of daisies.
Today I saw the face of evil whichever way I turned,
I, who once only saw the face of God whichever way I turned.
Yes, Pirooz, I hope this modernity of yours
Rids the world of all the bad gangs,
And brings together all the many good gangs.
I hope modernity will cleanse itself and cleanse the skies,
So the stars return and enlighten the spirit of modern man,
Uniting humankind into a single happy family gang—a good gang,
That perhaps appoints you, Pirooz Jaan, keeper of the flame.
Thank you for your hospitality and your informative rants.
Hafez and I will see you again, I pray,
After you have completed a most fruitful life.
Khoda-Hafez,
(Good bye)
Jalalad-Din Rumi
Pirooz drops to his knees
And spreads himself across the cold kitchen floor,
Wailing, weeping, shaking like a seedling fig,
Caught in a vicious Caspian gale.
Dardedel Page 21