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Rumi

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out

existence; this place made from our love

of that emptiness! Yet somehow comes

emptiness, this existence goes.

Praise to that happening, over and over!

For years I pulled my own existence out

of emptiness. Then one swoop, one swing

of the arm, that work is over. Free of who I was,

free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope,

free of mountainous wanting.

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny

piece of straw blown off into emptiness.

These words I am saying so much begin to lose

meaning: existence, emptiness, mountain,

straw. Words and what they try to say sweep

out the window, down the slant of the roof.

I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to

know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens.

I’ve been knocking from the inside.

********

Out beyond ideas of wrong and right doing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the

soul lies down in that grass, the world is too

full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the

phrase “each other,” don’t make any sense.