“The saint knows
That the spiritual path
Is a sublime chess game with God
And that the Beloved
Has just made such a fantastic move
That the saint is now continually
Tripping over in joy and bursting out in Laughter
And saying, ‘I surrender.’
Whereas you, my dear,
I’m afraid you still think
You have a thousand serious moves.”
— Hafiz, Daniel Linskey
We listen to Hafiz
and drink from Love
as ink pours from your pen
spilling transgressive ghazals
on my body
and soul, unfolding
odes of silence and
resurrection.
***
I rise with the sun
and walk in the hills,
the trees’ limbs
surrender themselves
to unbound blue,
so I surrender my arms
to the sky. I lift my arms,
tree limbs become
my arms, their song
my song, their dance,
my dance. I surrender,
twirling and circling;
in this sanctuary,
I am a dervish dancer,
branches, trunks, leaves
circle my spinning:
loosing ourselves to
ourselves, trees
and self, one in
another.
Laughter
rises from the earth,
convulsing in rapture;
I’m engulfed in delight.
I laugh in earth,
trees, sun, and sky,
together we spin,
spin, spin in laughter,
moment after ineffable moment:
the Beloved winks his eye
and laughs, lifts me
into the blue expanse,
and then tenderly tosses me into
the splendor of
everything.
***
Laughing,
we surrender
to laughter. We
listen to Hafiz then
we burn his chessboard,
calling on the fire
that doesn’t consume.
In radiance its flames transfigure
a checkered playing field
into an acorn, and from
a sublimely rigged game
rises an oak sapling.
You reach for my hand,
my fingers squeeze yours:
together in stillness
we watch it mature.
We climb a grassy knoll;
our oak shades the hill,
an ancient expanse
of root, trunk, branch, and leaf.
In the ground
near its base we find
a knife without blade;
we etch our names in oak bark,
the names we have worn before,
name by name, we cover memory
with naming. My arms
slip around your neck,
your arms slip
around my back;
we dance, circling
our ten thousand names,
drinking from Love,
a million seasons pass:
a dervish for two,
ecstasy in one.
With our every turn
the Beloved laughs louder,
black eyes filled with the night’s stars,
teeth shining with the moon,
the Beloved surrounds us in laughter;
we spin, spinning
as one, under oak,
stars, moon, laughter
until ecstasy’s circles
surrender to silence.
The Beloved laughs, rolls
us into a ball, breathes
on our round silent joy,
then again tosses us
to the ground. We fall,
fall from stars and moon, fall
from laughter, fall onto a new
chess board; we forget fire, acorn,
sapling, oak; forget our dance around
ten thousand names.
The Beloved winks, tossing his head
in ecstatic abandon. We rise
once more, wearing new names,
that we will carve into oak,
with the knife without blade,
when Laughter again remembers
the splendor
of everything.