Song for Krishna Janmashtami

Has no one told you?
   The fingers of the infinite play your wounds

         like the holes in a flute.
      You could be an instrument for the breath

            that impregnates gardens.

Pressing your bruises, the healer makes melody

   pass through the emptiness in your thigh.

      Your scent fills him with longing, though you

         are but one of a trillion jasmine petals
            dancing in his exhalation.

God is a hungry ghost without you.
    Why not be his flute?

         So hollow, yet hollowness so useful!
A song until now never heard in this world,

    only in that one.
         This is the music of the body.

              That was only music of the mind.

The foreplay of Lover and Beloved

     is the path to annihilation

          where we get the concept of Zero.

              One is not enough, Two is too many.
The outbreath and inbreath consummate

    their marriage in stillness.

        "I do" is a mantra dissolving both bride and groom

             in the cup of Unknowing.

 

Renew these vows

     with each rise and fall of your chest,

          this is how to make the marriage last.
               When the golden dahlia bursts open,
                    do you count her petals?

When the Friend appears under the arbor
     of your ribs, do you even notice
          the two brown naked feet
               that crush the clusters in your heart?

Let your eyes be like withered roses,
     blinded to every abyss but God.
          Gaze into radiant darkness
               at the center of the sun.
Become the look that looks at you.

     Grace is a dagger, not an abstraction.
          The first gasp of this life was ignited
               by the last pulse of that one.

Now the cup overflows because the wine steward

      cannot stop pouring.

           The spinning sommelier himself is drunk.
                This is no miracle, just physics.
It’s how Otherness tops off the self
     and become a fragrance
          to intoxicate the Friend.

 

Don’t be an image in the attic mirror.
     Be a blossom rooted in the mud

          of kisses and tears.

If the wanderer can’t find her way Home,

     Home will return to the wanderer.

          Silence is the climax of thinking.

Modesty drowns in billows of wonder.
     No island to swim rhythmically to,

          no breast-stroke of prayer,

               merely a fin slicing through wavelessness,
a voice crying through your lips:
     "Don’t throw me even a thread of hope!

          How can I call for salvation

               when I am sinking in a wave of the Beloved?”

Friend, you have no choice.

     You are a burst of foam on the milk ocean,

          a ripple on the sea of birth and death,

               a teardrop in eternity churned up
                    by yearning for this alone:

 

A cry of pain and sweetness
     more luscious than “Govinda, Krishna, Ram!”

          savored by your tongue, in your belly,

               and on the soles of your feet.
No syllable contains this secret hymn of silence.

     All the pages of the Veda do not sing it.
          Only the curves your body

                can encircle the beauty
                    of its breath.
_________________________

Note: Krishna Janmashtami is the Birthday
of Lord Krishna celebrated at Summer's end.