The Final Boss?

This is the last—and to me—one of the most important poems in my book “Ideas of Improvisation” and was also one of the final poems I wrote when finishing the manuscript. As such I wasn't totally happy with the version in the book and have kept revising it since. Here is a version that I think is much closer to my original intent. A reader may find it useful to keep in mind that the first poem in Rumi’s Masnavi is “The Song of the Reed Flute” and that the Ney flute is very important to Sufis in general and Rumi in particular. While Rumi’s masterpiece deals with various types of separation, mine has different concerns. Throughout my book the ideas of entanglement & superposition keep popping up. I was very interested in having superposition play an important part not just in the content of this poem, but also its construction. Thus when the reader encounters the lines:

“what fluted thing 

could ruin love”

they are forced to make a choice-does one read this to mean ‘what fluted thing could ruin adore’ or ‘what fluted thing could degrade love’? Both meanings are grammatically superposed in the text and it is only the mind of the reader that collapses the waveform of meaning in one direction or the other. Thus the poem is at least two different poems intertwined with each other. And in case anyone is wondering, yes this poem is in conversation with the famous Rumi quote involving ruin. Enjoy!

THE RUMI IN YOU

may stir to wonder

what fluted thing 

could ruin love

as much as the rasp 

of eroding rain?

And as you hear rasp

you may think of rust,

another shade of ruin

related to rain.

Do you not still grasp

why Jalaluddin 

was among the Last Poets 

whose rustic beard

faced arrest in every nation

including rumination?

When the past Harvest moon

acquired a cover of clouds,

did you begin to love

your most purple bruise,

or did you begin

to whisker a weak chin 

because your own ruined beauty 

wasn’t a wearable thing?

Although you’ve seldom

whispered it, wabi-sabi—

Japanese for a reign of rust—

seems a roomy word.

When you first heard

a lilac flute

begin to flower,

did you overhear

any faith

in imagination?

Did this sprouting

prevent or incite 

a diction

to the long open you

found in “bruise”

or hint why that i

so central to faith 

ran quietly as a letter

left out in the rain?

And how might this frame

the eye in ruin

or the eye in union?

Assuming the answer—

could you not see it?

Perhaps outside some window

the U in Rumi mishears

a whirling tune

of windblown petals 

reining in whispers

and wonders—

now sapphire as the i of a sufi—

if one seeks 

to whisk a thicker roux

from a flower’s fat sorrow,

do either your beard

or your bruises

mean to masquerade

as faith or even masculinity?

Or do they merely mean

to petal a purple music

of fluted blooms

until there could

be some chance 

the Rumi in you

happens to sense

what separates us

from the nay in name 

or begins to learn

how some become lovers

of the sound of rain, 

yet others simply lovers

of the sound of ruin?