18 Fear In Paradise
This morning Professor Pirooz flies to Phoenix,
With his return ticket safely in his pocket
And his luggage stuffed above him in the rack.
At the airport he flags a taxi, and to the sleepy brown cabbie says,
“Hello! Do you remember me?”
Says the cabbie with a sunflowerish smile:
“Of course I remember—
You are the crazy man with plenty of pennies,
Who went to the Sonora in the middle of the night.”
Says Pirooz: “And now I wish to go there again,
In the middle of the afternoon, to the very same spot.
But this time your rearview mirror will be full of smiles,
And this time you will wait for me and then drive me back.”
“You’re the boss,” says the cabbie.
Putting the dusty car in gear, they are quickly off.
As they speed toward the desert, like a bee toward a bloom,
Pirooz can’t help but wonder who this cabbie really is.
He has learned that anybody can be anybody,
That birth is not the only beginning, death not the only end.
How can anybody’s soul be fixed as a cabbie’s soul at birth?
Perhaps this brown fellow is really an engineer,
With the plans for the world’s longest bridge,
Burning bolt by bolt in his head.
Perhaps he is a prophet, just waiting
To straighten out man’s convoluted beliefs.
Wasn’t Hafez a poet masquerading as a cabbie?
Or a cabbie writing poems while waiting
For some modern genius to invent the cab?
Was Hafez always a cactus,
Permitted short vacations in the skin of a man?
Was Bob Oyster a clerk or a poet,
Or only an oyster with the talent to paint?
Who can say who anyone is or was?
Who can say who anyone will be?
Conception, birth, upbringing, death, evolution,
Are all transmogrifications of one thing into another.
Sadly, socialization transforms a born original
Into an indoctrinated copy.
As the meter clicks and the desert spreads out,
Pirooz wonders who he is, too.
And who he has been.
And who he will become.
His I the doer, the thinker,
His me the receiver of good or bad in life,
And his mine the possessor of belongings in and out of his mind.
If only he could renew his consciousness
His I, me, and mine,
Even beyond the bounds of his imagination,
And fly to the most distant futures
And embrace the answers to his many questions.
If only he could know what he could know, or should know.
If only amorphous time, he thinks, were a giant tree,
With real roots grinding deep into the rocks of existence.
If only this tree could be uprooted by a colossal storm—
Then those secretive roots, bared in sunlight,
Would spill all of history’s secrets,
So everyone would know more about themselves.
If only the future were embedded in the tree’s springtime blossoms,
Then catching the wind-blown petals,
Man would know the arriving of things before their arrival.
History hides itself, because it is ashamed of itself.
And so it cannot be uprooted, no matter how fierce the storm.
And seemingly coniferous, it has no flowers to trumpet the future.
So man is left leaning against the tree’s great trunk,
As uncertain about his past as he is about his future,
Worrying that tomorrow a falling limb will crush him.
Oh, how comforting to cling onto the surfaces, Pirooz thinks,
To be happy ducks splashing over the surfaces,
Unaware of the big crocodiles below the surfaces.
“Here we are boss,” says the cabbie.
Pirooz looks about nervously at the acres of cactuses and hills.
“You will wait for me?” he asks apprehensively,
Showing the cabbie a fistful of twenty dollar bills.
“I’ll stay put boss,” the cabbie assures him,
Producing a six-pack of cold Corona beer.
Says Pirooz, opening the door:
“Please don’t be alarmed by anything you may see,
For anything may happen today, to these cactuses or to me.”
“Okay boss, don’t worry boss,” the cabbie says,
“In my mirror I’ve seen it all, including myself looking back.
So, boss, your secrets are safe with me.”
Pirooz breathes deeply, inhaling his expectations,
Exhaling the last of his anxieties.
He gets out, straightens his pantlegs,
And trudges toward the hill that looks most right.
A bat flaps overhead, as if welcoming Pirooz back.
And a roadrunner dashes by,
To tell all the desert’s creatures that the stranger is back.
But Pirooz, trudging introspectively,
Like a pilgrim trudging toward Mecca’s black stone,
Is oblivious to these swirling events.
He sees and hears nothing,
Except what he hopes to see and hear at the end of his walk.
Nearing his chosen hilltop he sees two tall saguaros side by side.
His heart quickens its beat,
Like a rocket palpitating to take off.
His walk becomes a gallop,
As his agonizing question becomes a beggar’s prayer:
Are those cactuses Rumi and Hafez?
Please let Rumi and Hafez be them!
He reaches the hilltop and falls to his knees,
Struggling for the courage to look up and say to them, “Hello?”
Suddenly a sweet familiar voice fills the thin dry air:
“Pirooz, stop breathing so hard,
Or I’ll be forced to give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation!”
Pirooz begins to cry, asking in a shaky voice: “Hafez! Is that you?”
Hafez laughs and Rumi laughs,
And though Pirooz is happy with relief,
He is also shocked and filled with disbelief.
He had expected to find them covered with dewy tears,
In agony over their return to prickly skins.
“What is wrong with the two of you?” he asks,
“Carrying on like a pair of happy ducks,
When all those you left in New York
Are mourning you, missing you, dying anew every day for you.”
Answers Rumi: “Pirooz! Your love for us has brought you to us,
Just as our love for you made us miss you while we waited.
What better way to celebrate a reunion than to laugh and laugh?”
Hafez is more serious: “But don’t think us callous or frivolous.
We are as grieved as you and feel like crying as much as you.
But in this desert tears are dear and evaporate quickly,
While laughters echo from hill to hill.
So we laugh instead of cry, choose celebration over grief.
And laughter is therapeutic, as Freud should have said!”
Pirooz protests: “Celebration? What celebration?”
Answers Hafez: “I have mounted the impossible
Mountain of life after death.
I have met Mitra and loved Mitra,
Tasted the love of all loves after death.
I have melded with Mitra body and soul,
Achieved the vasal of all vasals with Mitra after death.
Pirooz Jaan, you still don’t understand,
A moment of vasal is no less vasal than years of vasal.
Vasal is beyond the tem
porariness of momentary life.
Vasal is even beyond the eternality of death.
I am the most fortunate of men—
If not me who should laugh and laugh?”
Pirooz is shocked: “Yes, you loved Mitra, but what of Mitra?
She is a widow at fifteen, soon to be a mother.
And what about Mitra’s loneliness?
What about a child growing without his baba?
Hafez is strangely sanguine: “Once Mitra told me
She would have given her life to meet me and be in my arms.
She realized her wish and she is still alive!
True, her baby will not have a baba,
But it will have a wonderful mother, and a fine grandmother,
And a grandfather who comes with
An armful of presents from time to time.
And the baby will have an exceptional uncle—Uncle Pirooz—
Who will finally realize the meaning of his name, Victorious,
By victoriously looking out for the child of the twice-dead Hafez.
And the child will love and love you, Pirooz Jaan,
As I love you, Pirooz Jaan.
Pirooz now stands still, dazed, bedazzled,
As the twin saguaros shake the hillside
With their thundering thunderlaughs.
What can he do but thunderlaugh with them,
And wonder if the cabbie also feels the earth move?
And what can he do but dance a sama,
Twirling close to Hafez and kiss and kiss his thorny hide
Until his lips are covered with blood.
Rumi, magic desert warden of every liquid drop,
Stops the bleeding before Pirooz kisses himself into a faint.
“Be careful,” he tells their mortal friend,
“That the time you come to the desert not to die,
Is not the very time that you die!”
So Pirooz stops dancing and kissing
And sits like an Indian on the glassy sand,
And watches the two wonderful cactuses
As the evening sun begins its orange-ball slide.
Finally Hafez asks him: “Tell me about my Mitra,
So I can laugh and laugh,
As my heart breaks and breaks and breaks.”
Pirooz pulls his knees up under his chin,
And thinks for a moment just where to start.
There is so much to tell him.
And most of it so sad that Hafez, and even Rumi,
Might laugh themselves to shreds.
“Mitra,” he begins, “has not uttered a single word since your death.
Nor has she heard a single word.
Her eyes are glued to the walls of her bedroom,
To the low ceiling and the closet doors,
Where she has pasted the pages of your Divan.
And she has written in black letters on her dresser mirror
These words of Rumi: I was raw, I was cooked, I was burned.
“Her bedroom is the desert of Majnun,
But instead of the living animals of Majnun,
To nuzzle and share a silent dardedel,
Her dead toy animals are piled in the corner,
Bored with their own frigidity.
She does not play her harp,
She does not sing, listen to music, or watch her TV.
She has locked herself in, thrown her key into the abyss.
Her world is a still world, her world is a deaf world,
Her world is a speechless, cureless, and hopeless world.
She refuses her mother’s help, her father’s help,
Her doctor’s help, my help.
When she does have to communicate,
She sends an e-mail from her computer
To her mother’s computer, just across the hall.
Still, there is a flicker of hope.
She reads voraciously like you read voraciously.
I have grown a bad back lugging my books for her across town!”
Pirooz now reaches into his coat pocket,
Pulling out a page of pink paper,
Folded and folded, like the folds of a fan.
“And, Hafez Jaan, she has been writing poems.
I brought one to read, though I warn you, it is really quite sad.”
He waits for Hafez to nod his permission,
Then begins to read:
“Yesterday:
Hope and love, dazzling and magical,
Danced in the heart of my palpitations.
Yesterday was me.
Today:
The love of all loves is the ash of all ashes,
As dark as unmined coal, cold as the marrow of Antarctica,
As tragic as strangled yearnings,
As unrelenting as a haunting thought.
Today I know not who is me.
Tomorrow:
I won’t see Hafez.
Tomorrow:
My hope is emptier than empty,
As if nothing exists, as if nothing will ever exist,
As if no father were ever born, as if all fathers are gone,
As if all babies are orphaned before birth,
As if all mothers wish to die before death,
As if God tore my heart out and fed it to the vultures,
Just so He could thunderlaugh and enjoy His power!
Tomorrow is me.”
As Pirooz refolds the poem he sees that a single tear
Is rolling down Hafez’s quivering green trunk.
No one says a word for the longest time, perhaps for an hour,
Perhaps for a single sad minute that seems sixty long.
The sun is being devoured by the light-starved valleys
And the sky, stained with clouds of blood, is the color of undyed wool.
Finally Pirooz says: “I asked Mitra to come along, you know.
But her e-mail said she could not stand to see Hafez as a cactus.
Better she said, to go to Shiraz and crawl into his grave.”
Hafez laughs a tragic laugh: “The cactus could not bear it either.”
Continues Pirooz: “But she did want me to ask you
If you had a favorite name, a boy’s name and a girl’s name,
For the baby that’s coming soon, any day.”
Hafez begins to twinkle, ever so slightly, as if he had eyes.
“Mitra will know what to call the baby—yes, Rumi Jaan?”
“Yes,” Rumi answers. “She will know.”
Hafez now changes the subject abruptly,
As the night’s first star blinks abruptly.
“Listen to my dardedel, Pirooz Jaan:
The only reward I received for another untimely death,
Is to count only galaxies instead of each star.
I might as well be counting neurons inside Mowlana’s head!”
This makes Pirooz and Rumi laugh, real laughs, happy laughs.
Hafez goes on: “No wonder I wanted, and still want,
To turn the world upside-down and design a new world
With less grief and more joy,
And establish a new order with no scarcity of reason,
And no wonder I’m a galaxy counter in my second death.
A divinely designed death sentence, wouldn’t you both agree?
Who said the heavenly masters are not compassionate!”
Dead Rumi laughs.
Dead Hafez laughs.
Grieving Pirooz laughs.
The sleepy, brown, beer-guzzling cabbie laughs.
The bats and coyotes, the beetles and snakes, the thirsty desert,
Everyone and everything, laughs and laughs and laughs,
At every silly thing that exists they laugh.
Even angels with nothing to do upstairs
But play hopscotch on the clouds, laugh and laugh.
Even old Father Abraham, playing chess with Zoroaster,
While a bull holds a lamp,
Grabs his bulging belly and
laughs,
Waking The Almighty from his eternal catnap.
God rubs his holy eyes and claps his holy hands,
And declares categorically: “I’m glad I invented laughter!”
Then as the laughter in the desert dies,
God returns to his nap,
Leaving who else but Gabriel to explain that:
“God is very old, even older than time,
Even older than entropy,
And needs all the heavenly rest he can get.”
Hearing the archangel’s words, Pirooz chuckles and exclaims:
“Many thanks to God for inventing laughter,
To compensate for his not-so-funny inventions!”
Once again everyone and everything begin to laugh.
Even God in his dream laughs, “Ha! Ha!”
And decides in his dream that:
“After Pirooz says good-bye to his life, and all his possibility talk,
I should make him a tiny green, teddy bear cholla,
And make him stand between Rumi and Hafez,
Those two troublesome saguaros,
To count and count red ants trooping by!”
Then God’s afterthoughts crown God’s thoughts, and He asks:
“Have I, God of all gods, exhausted all of my possibilities?
Was I not once a possibility myself—
The mother and father of all possibilities possible?”
All things being God’s thoughts
Now laugh at all things being God’s thoughts.
Even the red ants that never laugh,
Laugh until they cry and cry
Worrying why God suddenly wants them counted.
When everything has once more stopped laughing,
Rumi asks Pirooz: “Have you written any poems yourself?”
Pirooz claps his hands.
“I am so glad you asked! Yes, Rumi Jaan, yes!
I’ve not only written some, but published one!”
He reaches into another pocket and pulls out a crumbled page.
“During the winter I went to Florida,
To Sanibel Island, to thaw out my soul.
I wanted Mitra and her mother to go along,
But Mitra wouldn’t budge, and her mother wouldn’t leave her,
So I boarded a plane and flew like a single goose south.
I got lost canoeing in the mangroves,
So frightened out of my wits,
That I wrote a poem about my experience.
And I brought it along for the two of you.
I call it ‘Fear In Paradise.’
How appropriate for us!”
He uncrumples the page and begins:
“Lost in the mangrove cave waterways,
Of Sanibel Island sanctuary,
My canoe stuck in the mud.
I tremble as grumbling clouds invade the sky,
Tearing the bleeding sun with their dark claws,
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