We
met on the endless ride into stillness,
seated on the same donkey, every atom
of my flesh an oasis, every atom of yours a well.
When we gazed at each other, we could not speak,
because our mouths were filled with one sky.
Still our hearts broke with that sound, the scratch
of brittle leaves against the prison window.
When the breeze blew out of the East, how those
iron bars rang with sweet songs of exile!
If we did not hone our loins with stabbing tears
of ancient friendship, what beauty could seep
from our jagged bones, like the wine
Christ served at the wedding?
Nothing caused this radiance between our ribs,
we simply gave up trying to arrive.
Yet beauty is more lovely half-veiled, seen by
one whose eyes have been polished by waiting.
You danced at the edge of a meadow near Aleppo
in rags of moonlight, frog song, and blackberries.
These were but appearances, I know,
for we are a broken mala whose scattered beads
became the stars, and we the silence between them,
though their thread is still tethered to the sacrum,
where the pain of yearning gushes up.
This wounded flute makes music because
it has been torn from a living branch, like yours,
with seven gashes for the song-maker's breath.
Don't all wounds widen into one ancestral emptiness?
Everyone receives them, yet in different places.
They keep us open to the gift of the Beloved's absence,
the grace of the One, floating on an ocean of zeros -
which must be why the purest prayer is merely
"O!"
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