The poem as multiverse. 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 better reflects my original intent. A reader may find it useful to know 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 wound
could ruin love”
they are forced to make a choice-does one read this to mean ‘what fluted wound could ruin adore’ or ‘what fluted wound 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. There are also the multiple pathways opened up by reading “rein in whispers” as “rain in whispers” or “reign in whispers” which gives the poem at least three possible endings even before you encounter the wordplay inherent in “the Rumi in you / may turn to sense /what separates us” where “turn to sense” has multiple meanings. Thus the poem becomes multiple different poems intertwined with each other. And in case anyone is wondering, yes this poem is in conversation with the famous Rumi quotes involving both wounds & ruin. Enjoy!
THE RUMI IN YOU
may whirl and wonder
what fluted wound
could ruin love
more than the rasp
of rain eroding?
And when you hear rasp
you may think of rust,
another shade of ruin
related to rain.
Do you still not grasp
why Jalaluddin
was among the Last Poets
who faced annihilation
in every nation—
even rumination?
When the Harvest moon
was covered by clouds,
did you not learn to lavender
your deepest bruise,
or did you whisker
a weak chin because
your own ruined beauty
wasn’t a wearable thing?
Even unspoken
wabi-sabi—
the reign of rust—
could be a roomy phrase.
When you first heard
a lavender flute
begin to bloom,
did you also feel
any traces of faith?
And did those traces
veil or reveal devotion
to the long open U
found in “bloom”
or hint why the i
so central to faith
ran quietly as a letter
left out in the rain?
And might this dot
an eye in ruin
or the eyes in union?
But perhaps
outside your window
the U in Rumi mishears
a whirling tune
of windblown petals
as ‘rein in whispers’
and turns like a pupil
in the i of a sufi
to wonder:
to whisk a thicker roux
from a flour’s fat sorrow—
do bruises or beards
begin to masquerade as faith
or even masculinity?
Or do they risk dissolving
into hollow blooms
until there’s a chance
the Rumi in you
may turn to sense
what separates us
from the Ney in name
or return to view
how some become lovers
of the sound of rain,
yet others simply lovers
of the sound of ruin?
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