& each fish feels solid land before its gills
cease moving. I miss sex but can’t imagine 

dating. Glass shatters in patterns designed 
for a specific aftermath. What confession  

offers isn’t relief. From my bed, coverlet tucked 
under chin, I heard my father’s hand connect 

with my mother’s cheek. A fish slap requires 
actual fish-to-face contact. Windowpanes 

bust in shards. Car windshields spider & smash
into square chunks or mini blocks, so on impact 

they won’t decapitate or slash the face. A tank’s
ideal temperature for tropical fish is 75 to 80 degrees. 

I tried to learn how to stab the worm on the hook 
to bait the prey, but in the end I was only called 

a pussy. Tackle box tipped over, the red & white
striped sleek lure. Don’t they think of everything: 

claims to cover any minor loss, inspections to avert 
damage. Even so, at the health center, the multiple-choice

form omits the oval to fill in adopted so I leave 
the question blank. We’re here to consider my choices

in contraception, how to prevent an itchy rash down there 
& to discuss the definitions of sex & life. What’s hereditary 

gets lost to wonderland, elsewhere a consultant advises 
curators on predation, tells the team which fish to import 

for show-stopping colors & compatibility. But we know 
the inspector misses the crack, walks by the leak, & finally 

without pause someone sweeps & stuffs dozens of trash bags 
with glass & dead fish parts. We want what we want.

^{translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori}

I’m not that unrequited lover, so bitter I flee Love.
There’s no dagger in my hand,
no urge to dodge a challenge.

I am a wooden board the carpenter sizes up. 
His axe, his nails—they don’t worry me.

Let the carpenter make something of me.
If I resist, let Love’s flames have me. 

I’ll be cramped and dark as a cave
if I flee the friend who finds me there.

I’ll be frustrated, dull, and barren as stone,
if I don’t step out of my petty self,
take off its tight shoes, 
and wade into rubies. 

How many eons must pass 
before the treasures I find here appear again. 
Why ignore them now?

And why not seek my noblest self?
I’m not here to be ignoble. 

I don’t have a queasy stomach.
Why should I flee the tavern?

And why fear the prince?
I’m not a bandit, 
though I curb my heart.
“Quit it! Enough!” I tell it foolishly.

My heart answers back,
“I’m in a gold mine, deep in gold.
Why flee your chance to give?”

I wonder what I’d do
               with eight arms, two eyes
                              & too many ways to give
                                             myself away

                                             see, I only have one heart
                              & I know loving a woman can make you crawl
               out from under yourself, or forget
the kingdom that is your body

& what would you say, octopus?
               that you live knowing nobody
                              can touch you more
                                             than you do already

                                             that you can’t punch anything underwater
                              so you might as well drape yourself
                                             around it, bring it right up to your mouth
                              let each suction cup kiss what it finds

                                             that having this many hands
                              means to hold everything
               at once & nothing
to hold you back

that when you split
               you turn your blood
                              blue & pour
                                             out more ocean

                                             that you know heartbreak so well
                              you remove all your bones
so nothing can kill you.

^{I don’t make any separations. A poem is a poem.
A building’s a building…. I mean, it’s all structure.
—John Hejduk}

I need villanelles of you pulling 
my breath like lines moving down

the page and the promise of rhyme 
bending my ear. I need a sestina

of touch, patterns of palm, stroke,
skim, brush, and rub returning—

a cycle of sound and pressure I
apprehend in my bones. I need

the triolet’s refrain rolling off 
your tongue like a sample, new

and nuanced here and here and here.
It’s all structure is why I need angles

of play, the love our bodies build.
I miss you. The ache's more sour

than a dropped foot, a forced rhyme.
If you're free from me too long,

what will you jettison first? Meter?
Lines? Come home. Our sonnet’s

the fourteen creases in the sheets. 
A couplet of light greens your eyes

only inches from mine when iambs
ascend atop iambs. Please. I need

you in haiku: distilled in syllables,
laid bare in the last line’s turn.

I now replace desire 

with meaning. 

Instead of saying, I want you, I say, 

there is meaning between us.

Meaning can swim, has taken lessons from the river 

of itself. Desire is air. One puncture 

above a black lake and she lies flat.

I now replace intensity with meaning.

One is a black hole of boundless appetite, a false womb,

another is a sentence.

My therapist says children need a “father” for language 

and a “mother” for everything else.

She doesn’t get that it’s all language. There is no else. 

Else is a fiction of life, and a fact of death.

That night, we don’t touch. 

We ruin nothing. 

We get bagels in the morning before you leave on a train, 

and I smoke a skinny cigarette and think 

I look glam, like an Italian diva.

You make a joke at my expense, which is not a joke, really, 

but a way to say I know you. 

I don’t feed on you. Instead, I watch you 

like a faraway tree. 

Desire loves the what if, the if only, the maybe in another lifetime. 

She loves a parallel universe. Or seven. 

Meaning knows its minerals,

knows which volcanic magma belongs 

to which volcanic fleet.

Knows the earth has parents. That a person is raised. 

It’s the real flirtation, to say, you are not a meal. 

To say, I want you 

to last. 

^{translated from the Italian by Will Schutt}

You pursue me with a thought, are a thought 
that comes to me without thinking, like a shiver 
you slowly scorch my skin and lead my eyes 
toward a clear point of light. You’re a memory 
retrieved and glowing, you’re my dream 
beyond dreams and memories, the door that closes 
and opens onto a wild river. You’re something 
no word can express, and in every word you resonate 
like the echo of a slow exhale, you’re my wind 
rustling the spring foliage, the voice that calls 
from a place I do not know but recognize as mine.
You’re the howl of a wolf, the voice of the deer 
alive and mortally wounded. My stellar body.

Corpo Stellare 

Mi segui con un pensiero, sei un pensiero 
che non devo nemmeno pensare, come un brivido 
mi strini piano la pelle, muove gli occhi 
verso un punto chiaro di luce. Sei un ricordo 
perduto e luminoso, sei il mio sogno 
senza sogno e senza ricordi, la porta che chiude 
e apre sulla corrente di un fiume impetuoso. Sei una cosa 
che nessuna parola può dire e che in ogni parola 
risuona come l’eco di un lento respiro, sei il mio vento 
di foglie e primavere, la voce che chiama 
da un posto che non so e riconosco e che è mio.
Sei l’ululato di un lupo, la voce del cervo 
vivo e ferito a morte. Il mio corpo stellare.

I’ll say it—the most remarkable way a man 
has touched me is when he didn’t intend to, found
the heat of me on accident. I’m saying his hand
punctured the gap between our backs, rooted around

for the blanket we shared and swept my rib-ridged side.
In movies, that touch is the domino
that starts the chain, but his bed did not abide
by rules of fantasy. He touched me and, oh,

I held my breath. Waited for the regret
he never felt. My God, he touched me then slid
closer beneath the duvet, our spines close-set
arches that joined in the dark, kissing. I did

not know it then, but his fingers flexed with want
into the night. His heart at my back. Desire out front.

I love your hands:
They are big hands, firm hands, gentle hands;
Hair grows on the back near the wrist . . . .
I have seen the nails broken and stained
From hard work.
And yet, when you touch me,
I grow small . . . . . . . and quiet . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . And happy . . . . . . . .
If I might only grow small enough
To curl up into the hollow of your palm,
Your left palm,
Curl up, lie close and cling,
So that I might know myself always there,
. . . . . . . Even if you forgot.

remembering the boys—
much older, only unsettling
in hindsight

back then, they gave us
beers and we took them,
uncertain in the summer

of sage and honey.
we hid in the bathroom
so we could talk

for a while, swimming in the empty
bathtub and watching each
other’s reflections in the mirror.

the boys waited outside
in the yard, and we let them

wait while we were fifteen
and silver-tongued, all shoulder-
blades and hummingbird and safe
for now

A firm hand. The shadow waves of satin.
I am not yet flesh. He calls me baby,
and I touch my face. I’m searching for god
when I oil my body in the mirror. To love it
means to love a man means an opening
to another man. When I take my glasses off
all the lines blur. A body is a body without
language, I tell my girlfriend and she laughs,
mouth wide enough to hide in. She shows me
my softest parts. I dissolve into what. I forget
hiding also means a good beating, the way
passion can be suffering. I can’t believe
my whole life I never touched what made me
holy. We have bread, butter and nowhere to be.

Even in California
all of my friends require touch    

to get through winter.                
It’s true, I am waiting to be in love          

in front of the people I love.       
He says, I’m glad you’re here                       

& I want to cover his mouth
to warm my hands.        

Of course I understand              
how one would mistake

that earthquake for a passing train
but what do we do with the stillness                    

when after great change             
nothing moves, but his hand      

sliding a glass of wine
across the table

instructing me to drink              
with a single nod.

I bring the glass to my face                     
but don’t let a drop pass my lips.

Beside him, I am almost somewhere        
I’d like to be for a while.

To make him smile        
I tell him I am bad at sex.

To make him kiss me
I tell him when I’m happy

I go looking for things
I haven’t lost yet.

was sex and more of it. sex and talk of it. sex and sexuality and sexism. until some among us began to differentiate it. prefix and suffix it. label it a matter of preference, genetic reconnaissance at birth. and it was it and it was not it. until some among us began to psalm. and what about doing it. and when would we do it to each other again. and it was gratuitous. the blue and white lament of it. until it moved us into ecological proximity. what was near and how loud. the flesh budding, ripening. it had always been a matter of proximity. the what it is was close to us. lewd and it was common. consumptive and it was money. extractive and it was public.

to whet the thing a finger strums a seam of glass

then spirit set its feels on us

we were tending
we were swirling

and we were sensing when it hit us

a porous limb        a glowing portal

sam rivers on repeat

the romanticism of aromanticism inside a poem
the orifice of pitch        a clutch of birds

then our dreams became tumescent
such holiness was flame


and it was fuchsia fuchsia all over the place

there must be one thing you can’t have in order to be alive 

watching flowers open on youtube 

I mean, my life is wasted on my life

requirement is simple 

it takes a wound to

return to yourself 

the new sky 

is the same as the old one

its achy maw 

its barbwire grip 

people are whatever they are next to

that won’t remember them

a dumb desert 

a broken open sign

whatever I love best

reminds me of something else

I say hunger and mean your hands bitten to boneseed,
bandaged with bedsheet and the night while two states over,
a mouth—ready soil—says your name. Next June’s lover
speaks the harvest: your rich, vowel-tender song

but for the neighbor. More hello than amen. Not yet
a whole book of psalms. Choose this. Not your bare room.
Your self-vacancies. Unlearn empire’s blackness:
night spun savage, space cast empty when really

a balm slicks the split between stars. Really
hipthick spirits moonwalk across the lake ice.
Maps to every heaven gauze the trees in velvet
between that greenbright spectacle of bud and juice

and dust—I’m saying there’s no such thing
as nothing. Try and try, you’ll never disappear. 
I say hunger, mean hands you think empty
though everywhere, even the dark, heaves.

How desire is a thing I might die for. Longing a well,
a long dark throat. Enter any body

of water and you give yourself up
to be swallowed. Even the stones

know that. I have writhed
against you as if against the black

bottom of a deep pool. I have emerged
from your grip breathless

and slicked. How easily
I could forget you

as separate, so essential
you feel to me now. You

beneath me like my own
blue shadow. You silent as the moon

drifts like a petal
across your skin, my mouth

to your lip—you a spring
I return to, unquenchable, and drink.

You know I know what I’m doing.
I’m always with you.

I’m watching these lines get to you.
This is how we’re close.

We can’t have knowing looks
(we’re both as good as dead)

so we have these knowing lines,
typing till the clock says stop.

And if in the course of struggle
a foot slips and we fall,

what does that matter?
I won’t come back to you

when the song is over.
I will not want you

or your unsuitable house and lot.
Expect to miss me, though—

expect ice and snow, rain and hail.
To be embarrassed. To be changed.

To write the year on a check
and be one hundred years off.

To let it go
when I express displeasure.

To let my anger go. Just drop it. Just take it
as you drop it.

Just take it
and go.

                I come to party, I show up alone,

I feel the beat on my feet, and I’m soloing.

I sing sunshine hits in the club.

Sunshine hits baby. That’s just how I live, lawd—

                        And Lord was like—

I fled the scene,

done all I possibly could. The way it works is,

sunshine hits something and so, there is something.

Gradually, you become unlike that something

You used to hold.  I had held a cassette tape

in my hands, had held

a church in my hands,   

had held it with heavy hands, had felt love

Like adrenaline, to which no one in the church spoke.   

I had heard music emanating

from a cassette player, had heard it in church,      

had looked into the pastor’s eyes, had held her eyes   

In my hands, had felt her love like a fee.

                                                       Evil eyes,

everyone knows   

what your poems are about. Whatever it is

got me laughing.

10. Here on my knees I look for the single animal: you left

                                                   ravaged at the edge of a meadow

9. Is everything accounted for? The fingers dipped

                                     beneath the torso—to keep this body bright

8. Every breath we are desperate to take

                             sounds as if a war lost against a country of promise

7. Discarded halos: the light you remember

                   in your head—you feed on what is crushed between the teeth

6. America declares these dreams I have every night be re-

                                                      dreamed & pressed into names

5. Upended petals of qém’es

                                 abandoned like torn butterfly wings—we’é I pray

4. I pray that nobody

                  ever hears us

3. An eye gone

           bloodshot: I tear through the crisp apple of your throat & find—

2. myself: this—a boy beside a boy. An eyelash

                            fallen at the base of a valley, our dark bones bursting in-

1. to bloom. I stare into your beloved face & enter: yes,

                 yes, this nation, under god, its black sky we lay our nightmares to

0. where I am your animal: my Lamb—now eat

            me alive.

You could smell the day’s heat even before the day began. 
Constant trickle, endless green trees flanking the highway: 
summer had come back. Scattered trash 
on the apartment landing. Everyone passed by it. Everyone felt
it belonged to someone else. 

Grey fog, blue sunlight, stones like big footprints
in a wavering line across a lawn.
Everyone was talking about a new song 
in relation to the old: the same volume
but with no feeling. Standing on the porch 
just before the drizzle, 
fiercely missing my sister, how we used to take the bag 
of cut grass from the lawnmower 
and empty it over our bodies like rain.  

Days lost between the clock and my phone: I made coffee,
I brushed the cat, I went to work, I knew the time it took
to go from one room to another 
to collect my ironed shirt. I kept looking back 
to isolate individual moments, asking why
didn’t I give myself more fully to that 
friend, that stranger, that drinking, those
days. I remembered Kira and Chicago, 
leaving our apartment in the middle of the night, so hot even the moon 
looked hurt. I watched a chained dog strain
at every passerby. I thought, it must be hard
to have that much desire. 

Meanwhile, I’d gotten older. I’d grown 
accustomed to my body. 
I could sit with my shirt off
on a hot day and not think about
how my body looked 
or how I felt inside it. 
Cutting my hair the barber said, 
heat rises, that’s a known fact.
I liked her phrasing. I walked forever.
I was trying not to revise history
to make my present life
make sense. Raised voices; faded t-shirts
left in boxes on the street. 
Such strange intimacies. 
The telephones ringing 
in the houses as I passed. 

First, begin with the glottal stop. I learn  
it is more of a letter than a punctuation.         Hide 
your tongue /monoongen/                   let the air escape 
                                              your mouth / motoongen/ A push— 
of muscle. A catch in your                  throat/ mongoong /

‘Eyooshiraaw’nga/ In our language / it’s hard to hide 
the self–your relations.  Body  
parts require prefixes.             The Tongva language  
asks, who does this tongue belong to? Whose 
mouth speaks?  

The definition comes easily because 
 ‘Wiishmenok sounds like       wish,                a cousin to want  
 or like that could lead to                                desire or love.  

Wiishmenokre / I love you. / One word equals 
a sentence.                 The “re” is both the I  
and the you; the lover and the loved  
in two letters, side by side.                 But context matters.

Wiishemokre / I want you / I desire you— 
What could your lover mean?            What could they hide 
in this language?        Nay’ wiishemokne  
neshiiro’a / But I love my language. / I can become 
a translation of my own desire. 

Wiishemokne menee’ / I love this—
that this word can be smushedagainst  
others. Say to your lover:                   Shiraaw’shmenokne / I want to talk.  
Add the shiraaw/ talk / in front of the shmenok/ want. / End it with the /ne/ I.  
Let your tone do the rest. 

We could smush more words together. 
Háwtok / Perhaps / at the end  
of the night, you might say:                Miishmenokne / I want to go—
Or: chwiishkeshmenokre / I want to kiss you. 
End your night with all your wants. The lesson is done.

When your lips are coming toward me,
All my being melts away,
I am anointed in another world.
You refine the dross all to the golden substance,
Ten thousand future deeds are here created,
I clasp my lips on my eternal kingdom.

And if my heart be scarred and burned, 
The safer, I, for all I learned; 
The calmer, I, to see it true 
That ways of love are never new— 
The love that sets you daft and dazed 
Is every love that ever blazed; 
The happier, I, to fathom this: 
A kiss is every other kiss. 
The reckless vow, the lovely name, 
When Helen walked, were spoke the same; 
The weighted breast, the grinding woe, 
When Phaon fled, were ever so. 
Oh, it is sure as it is sad 
That any lad is every lad, 
And what’s a girl, to dare implore 
Her dear be hers forevermore? 
Though he be tried and he be bold, 
And swearing death should he be cold, 
He’ll run the path the others went.…
But you, my sweet, are different.

I speak your name in alien ways, while yet
         November smiles from under lashes wet.
   In the November light I see you stand
   Who love the fading woods and withered land,
Where Peace may walk, and Death, but not Regret.

The year is slow to alter or forget;
June’s glow and autumn’s tenderness are met.
   Across the months by this swift sunlight spanned,
                  I speak your name.

Because I loved your golden hair, God set
His sea between our eyes. I may not fret,
   For, sure and strong, to meet my soul’s demand,
   Comes your soul’s truth, more near than hand in hand;
And low to God, who listens, Margaret,
                  I speak your name.
 

^{November 20, 1892}

If thou shouldst return with the sweet words of love,
    So earnestly spoken that day,
Methinks that thy words, this sad heart would move,
    For my pride has melted away;
And I’ve learned how true was the heart that I spurned,
And I’ve longed for the face that never returned.

If thou shouldst return to claim me thy bride,
    How gladly thy fate would I share;
How gladly I’d spend my whole life at thy side,
    How honored I’d feel to be there;
Oh, I’ve learned to revere the heart that I spurned!
    And I long for the face that never returned.

If thou shouldst return, ah, vain is the dream!
    I’ll cherish the fancy no more;
Though dark and forsaken my pathway may seem,
I’ll press bravely on as before;
    And trust in the One who forgives our mistakes,
And heals the deep wounds that our waywardness makes.

I scarce believe my love to be so pure
   As I had thought it was,
   Because it doth endure
Vicissitude, and season, as the grasse;
Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore,
My love was infinite, if spring make’it more.

But if this medicine, love, which cures all sorrow
With more, not onely bee no quintessence,
But mixt of all stuffes, paining soule, or sense,
And of the Sunne his working vigour borrow,
Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use
To say, which have no Mistresse but their Muse,
But as all else, being elemented too,
Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do

And yet no greater, but more eminent,
   Love by the spring is grown;
   As, in the firmament,
Starres by the Sunne are not inlarg’d, but showne,
Gentle love deeds, as blossomes on a bough,
From love’s awakened root do bud out now.

If, as in water stir’d more circles bee
Produc’d by one, love such additions take,
Those like so many spheares, but one heaven make,
For, they are all concentrique unto thee,
And though each spring doe adde to love new heate,
As princes do in times of action get
New taxes, and remit them not in peace,
No winter shall abate the spring’s encrease.

The middle of a kiss, and though he opened

up wide and wider, her own small jawbones gave

a little crack and stuck, and look what happened:

as if she’d fallen in an open grave,

he swallowed her at last, and then she wandered

in a dark saturated country where

the red land throbbed with capillaries under

electric stars. A kiss had brought her there,

a simple kiss that rained and filled her head

with blood, a nightmare kiss, a wrong man kiss;

why had she kissed a man with such a mouth,

with such thick teeth and jaws, such tongue, instead

of kissing someone who would let her out,

kissing someone nicer, who ate less.

^{Deployment Day 220}

Most days are rice and radish,
the roiling of bones in a slick broth.
They are matchsticked carrot,
picked cilantro, the clean
blade of new onion.

Those days are lamb,
and piglet, the sleeping 
nose of spring suckling 
in new green. They are days 
when I fall asleep 
warm in our bed,
as the season thunders
softly to itself.

Others are nothing
but hunger, and the world 
becomes a tufted ear, 
a sprouted fang,
a desire to devour
children, grandmothers,
a huntsman whole.

Without the bone, there is no
soup. Without the soup,
only the gnaw of you
one ocean, another continent
away, and not answering
the phone. It is the held
breath, the way I must not
huff it out, instead howl
solemnly in the empty

night. When the skin comes
crawling off me—in a dark
bar, on a back porch,
tucked deep in white down—
I don't know how to fill
what teethes inside.
To be made of something
as cold as stone.
It's okay. I'm beginning
to learn that what I cannot 
blow down
will still burn.

^{translated from the French of Judith Gautier by James Whitall}

Before daybreak the breezes whisper 
through the trellis at my window;
they interrupt and carry off my dream, 
and he of whom I dreamed 
vanishes from me. 

I climb upstairs 
to look from the topmost window, 
but with whom? . . .

I remember how I used to stir the fire 
with my hairpin of jade 
as I am doing now . . .
but the brasier holds nothing but ashes. 

I turn to look at the mountain; 
there is a thick mist, 
a dismal rain, 
and I gaze down at the wind-dappled river, 
the river that flows past me forever 
without bearing away my sorrow. 

I have kept the rain of my tears 
on the crape of my tunic; 
with a gesture I fling these bitter drops 
to the wild swans on the river, 
that they may be my messengers.

Les Cygnes Sauvages

^{translated from the Chinese of Li Qingzhao by Judith Gautier}

Le vent souffle, avant l’aube, au dehors, sur les treillis de ma fenêtre.

Il interrompt et emporte mon rêve, il efface tout vestige de lui.

Pour voir aux alentours, je monte à l’étage supérieur . . . avec qui? . . .

Autrefois, je me souviens, du bout de l’épingle en jade de ma coiffure, je remuais le feu,

Comme je le fais à présent . . . mais le brasero est éteint.

Je tourne la tête vers la montagne: la pluie, un épais brouillard.

Je regarde vers le fleuve, tout bossué de vagues; le fleuve qui coule toujours, devant moi, sans emporter ma peine.

Sur le crêpe de ma tunique, j’ai gardé la pluie de mes larmes;

D’une chiquenaude, je chasse ces gouttes amères vers les cygnes du fleuve, pour qu’ils soient mes messagers.

浪淘沙·帘外五更风

帘外五更风，
吹梦无踪。
画楼重上与谁同？
记得玉钗斜拨火，
宝篆成空。

回首紫金峰，
雨润烟浓。
一江春浪醉醒中。
留得罗襟前日泪，
弹与征鸿。

^{Translated from the Arabic by Joseph Dacre Carlyle} 

When you told us our glances, soft, timid, and mild,
      Could occasion such wounds in the heart,
Can ye wonder that yours, so ungovern’d and wild,
      Some wounds to our cheeks should impart?

The wounds on our cheeks, are but transient, I own,
      With a blush they appear and decay;
But those on the heart, fickle youths, ye have shewn
      To be even more transient than they.

We do not suffer much now; it is over.
We wanted to forget; we have forgotten.
We tore our hearts with healing; they are healed.

You have gained peace, you who were once a lover,
The garlands of your sacrifice are rotten;
Your garden has become a clover field.

Only at times, in intervals of quiet,
When music gravely claims the twilight air,
And melts the sinews of some bitter thong,

Your heart feels something of the stress and riot
That flung it between rapture and despair;
Something awakes that has been sleeping long.

You say: I am so strong now, I could chance
To play with these old things a while, and taste
The occult savour that I knew so well,

Yet, what was this great love,—a strange romance,
A fierce three autumns, passionately chaste,—
Youth’s customary path, no miracle.

Even that frosty thought, so fugitive,
Shows what is lost beyond all hope to gain,
And just how far from love we two have gone.

We did forget, we healed ourselves, we live,
But we have lost essential joy and pain:
We lived; we died; and having died, live on.

^{translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori}

Come out, come close.
Why hide? Why deceive?

You are me and I am you.
Why get mired in me’s and you’s?

We are light upon light—
and the glass light passes through. 

Why muddy ourselves with a grudge?

Together, we are whole and complete.
Why see through eyes that split one in two?

Why do the rich look down on the poor?
Why does the right hand scorn the left?
Both are from one body.
Why call one vile and one blessed?

One essence, one intelligence 
thrust us into one curved cosmos.

Where the soul counts one,
the mind insists on two. 

Five senses, six directions—drop the lot. 
Leap forth. Let oneness 
draw you closer, and draw you in.  

There you are a gold mine,
not just a nugget of gold. 

There’s one spirit in countless bodies,
one oil in countless almonds,
one meaning in countless words 
uttered by countless tongues. 

Shatter the jugs. The water is one.

Steeped in union, the heart remembers 
a world beyond words.
Soul, send the news. 

^{translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori}

Let’s love each other,
let’s cherish each other, my friend,
before we lose each other.

You’ll long for me when I’m gone.
You’ll make a truce with me.
So why put me on trial while I’m alive?

Why adore the dead but battle the living?

You’ll kiss the headstone of my grave.
Look, I’m lying here still as a corpse,
dead as a stone. Kiss my face instead!

^{translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori}

Your laughter turns the world to paradise.
It tears through me like fire.
It teaches me.

Reborn in emptiness,
I emerge laughing,
here to learn from Love
new depths of laughter.

I’ve been short on courage,
but I have a heart of sunlight,
straight from the king’s hand.
I stir up laughter even in those who fear joy.

Crack open my shell. Steal the pearl.
I’ll still be laughing.
It’s the rookies who laugh only when they win.

Last night, the spirit of dawn came to my room
and gave me a lesson in laughter.
Our blazing roars lit the morning sky.

When I brood like a rain cloud,
laughter flashes through me.
It’s the habit of lightning to laugh through a storm.

Look at the furnace. Look at the stones.
See the glowing red veins?
Gold—laughing in fire, daring you,

“Prove you’re no fake!
Laugh even when you lose.”

We’re fodder for death so learn to laugh
from the angel of death.
He laughs at the jeweled belts and crowns of kings—
all that splendor’s just on loan.

Treetop blossoms erupt in laughter.
Petals rain down.

Laugh like the bud of a flower,
hugging the ground.
Its hidden smile opens to a laugh that lasts a lifetime.

To the dragon
any loss is
total. His rest 
is disrupted
if a single 
jewel encrusted
goblet has
been stolen.
The circle
of himself
in the nest
of his gold
has been
broken. No
loss is token.