The Fragile Vial

[Luna Arjuna]

 

I need a mouth as wide as the sky

to say the nature of a True Person, language

as large as longing.

The fragile vial inside me often breaks.

No wonder I go mad and disappear for three days

every month with the moon.

For anyone in love with you,

it's always these invisible days.

I've lost the thread of the story I was telling.

My elephant roams his dreams of Hindustan again.

Narrative, poetics, destroyed, my body,

a dissolving, a return.

Friend, I've shrunk to a hair trying to say your story.

Would you tell mine?

I've made up so many love stories.

Now I feel fictional.

Tell me!

The truth is, you are speaking, not me.

I am Sinai, and you are Moses walking there.

This poetry is an echo of what you say.

A piece of land can't speak, or know anything!

Or of it can, only within limits.

The body is a device to calculate

the astronomy of the spirit.

Look through that astrolabe

and become oceanic.

Why this distracted talk?

It's not my fault I rave.

You did this.

Do you approve of my love-madness?

Say yes.

What language will you say it in, Arabic or Persian,

or what? Once again, I must be tied up.

Bring the curly ropes of your hair.

Now I remember the story.

A True Man stares at his old shoes

and sheepskin jacket. Every day he goes up

to his attic to look at his work-shoes and worn-out coat.

This is his wisdom, to remember the original clay

and not get drunk with ego and arrogance.

To visit those shoes and jacket

is praise.

The Absolute works with nothing.

The workshop, the materials

are what does not exist.

Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it.

Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing,

where something might be planted,

a seed, possibly, from the Absolute.

 

Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi translated by Coleman Barks