The Essential Rumi ~"

Translated by COL E MAN BAR KS

with JOHN MOYNE

A. J. ARBERRY

REYNOLD NICHOLSON

o 01 5

CASTLE BOOKS
 And so when I start speaking a powerful right arm
of words sweeping down, I know him from what I say,
and how I say it, because there's a window open
between us, mixing the night air of our beings." 4,..~ Spring Giddiness:
The youngest was, obviously,
the laziest. He won.
Stand in the Wake of This Chattering
and Grow Airy

ONLY BREATH

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,

SPRING GIDDINESS
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion
pringtime-when ecstasy seems the natural way to be and any other
or cultural system. I am not from the East
ut of tune with the season of soul growth. Song, airy silence, a lively
or the West, not out of the ocean or up
onversation between plants. No urgency about what gets said or not
from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not id. We feel part of some hilarious nub IJUlling up through the sur-
composed of clements at all. I do not exist, ace into light or lying back in a wagon going who knows where. The
eather of Spring in Persia and Turkey and in the southeastern
am not an entity in this world or the next,
nited States is all one long extravagant absorption with ground and
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any
ky, the fragrances and what unfolds from within. In lucky places
origin story. My place is placeless, a trace uch as these, Spring is not so much a metaphor for a state of attune-
of the traceless. Neither body or soul. ent as it is that attunement. Or say it this way: for a mystic, the
inner world is a weather that contains the universe and uses it as
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
symbolic language.
worlds as one and that one call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.

Again, the violet bows to the lily.

Again, the rose is tearing off her gown!
There is a way between voice and presence
where information flows. The green ones have come from the other world,
tipsy like the breeze up to some new foolishness.
In disciplined silence it opens.
Again, near the top of the mountain
With wandering talk it closes.
anemone's sweet features appear.

The hyacinth speaks formally to the jasmine,

"Peace be with you." "And peace to you, lad!
Come walk with me in this meadow."
 Again, there are sufis everywhere! The strumming and the flute notes
The bud is shy, but the wind removes rise into the atmosphere,
her veil suddenly, "My friend!" and even if the whole world's harp
should burn up, there will still be
The Friend is here like water in the stream, hidden instruments playing.
like a lotus on the water.
So the candle flickers and goes out.
The narcissus winks at the wisteria, We have a piece of flint, and a spark.
"Whenever you say."
This singing art is sea foam.
And the clove to the willow, "You are the one The graceful movements come from a pearl
I hope for." The willow replies, "Consider somewhere on the ocean floor.
these chambers of mine yours. Welcome!"
Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
The apple, "Orange, why the frown?" of driftwood along the beach, wanting!
"So that those who mean harm
will not see my beauty." They derive
from a slow and powerful root
The ringdove comes asking, "Where, that we can't see.
where is the Friend?"
Stop the words now.
With one note the nightingale Open the window in the center of your chest,
indicates the rose. and let the spirits fly in and out.
Again, the season of Spring has come
and a spring-source rises under everything,
a moon sliding from the shadows. GREAT WAGON

Many things must be left unsaid, because it's late, When I see your face, the stones start spinning!
but whatever conversation we haven't had You appear; all studying wanders.
tonight, we'll have tomorrow. I lose my place.

Water turns pearly.

Fire dies down and doesn't destroy.
WHERE EVERYTHING IS MUSIC
In your presence I don't want what I thought
Don't worry about saving these songs! I wanted, those three little hanging lamps.
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn't matter. Inside your face the ancient manuscripts
seem like rusty mirrors.
We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.
You breathe; new shapes appear, I would love to kiss you.
and the music of a desire as widespread The price of kissing is your life.
as Spring begins to move Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
like a great wagon. What a bargain, let's buy it.
Drive slowly.
Some of us walking alongside
are lame!
Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. They try to say what you are, spiritual or sexual?
They wonder about Solomon and all his wives.

In the body of the world, they say, there is a soul

and you are that.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there. But we have ways within each other
that will never be said by anyone.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense. Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. If you do not come, these do not matter.
Don't go back to sleep. If you do come, these do not matter.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill PRING IS CHRIST
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open. Everyone has eaten and fallen asleep. The house is empty.
Don't go back to sleep. We walk out to the garden to let the apple meet the peach,
to carry messages between rose and jasmine.
Spring is Christ,
raising martyred plants from their shrouds.
 Their mouths open in gratitude, wanting to be kissed.
THE STEAMBATH
The glow of the rose and the tulip means a lamp
is inside. A leaf trembles. I tremble Steam fills the bath, and frozen figures on the wall
in the wind-beauty like silk from Turkestan. open their eyes, wet and round, Narcissus eyes
The censer fans into flame. that see enormous distances, and new ears
that love the details of any story. The figures dance
This wind is the Holy Spirit.
like friends diving and coming up and diving again.
The trees are Mary.
Watch how husband and wife play subtle games with their hands. Steam spills into the courtyard. It's the noise
Cloudy pearls from Aden are thrown across the lovers, of resurrection! They move from one corner
as is the marriage custom. laughing across to the opposite corner. No one notices
how steam opens the rose of each mind,
The scent of Joseph's shirt comes to Jacob.
fills every beggar's cup solid with coins.
A red carnelian of Yemeni laughter is heard
Hold out a basket. It fills up so well
by Muhammad in Mecca.
that emptiness becomes what you want.
We talk about this and that. There's no rest The judge and the accused forget the sentencing.
except on these branching moments. Someone stands up to speak, and the wood of the table
becomes holy. The tavern in that second is actually made
of wine. The dead drink it in.
SHREDS OF STEAM Then the steam evaporates.
Figures sink back into the wall, eyes blank,
Light again, and the one who brings light! ears just lines.
Change the way you live! Now it's happening again, outside.
From the ocean vat, wine fire in each cup! The garden fills with bird and leaf sounds.
Two or three of the long dead wake up. We stand in the wake of this chattering and grow airy.
Two or three drunks become lion hunters. How can anyone say what happens, even if each of us
Sunlight washes a dark face. dips a pen a hundred million times into ink?
The flower of what's true opens in the face.
Meadowgrass and garden ground grow damp again.
A strong light like fingers massages our heads. HE GROUND CRIES OUT
No dividing these fingers from those.
I feel like the ground, astonished
Draw back the lock bolt. at what the atmosphere has brought to it. What I know
One level flows into another. is growing inside me. Rain makes
Heat seeps into everything. every molecule pregnant with a mystery.
The passionate pots boil. We groan with women in labor.
Clothing tears into the air. The ground cries out, I Am Truth and Glory Is Here,
Poets fume shreds of steam, breaks open, and a camel is born out of it.
never so happy as out in the light! A branch falls from a tree, and there's a snake.

39
 Muhammad said, A laith/it! believer Is a good camel, A vagrant wanders empty ruins.
always looking to its master, who takes perlect care. Suddenly he's wealthy.
He brands the flank.
But don't be satisfied with stories, how things
He sets out hay.
have gone with others. Unfold
He binds the knees with reasonable rules,
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
and now he loosens all bindings and lets his camel dance,
so everyone will understand the passage,
tearing the bridle and ripping the blankets.
We have opened you.
The field itself sprouts new forms,
Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy
while the camel dances over them, imaginary
and tired. Then comes a moment
plants no one has thought of,
of feeling the wings you've grown,
but all these new seeds, no matter how they try,
lifting.
do not reveal the other sun.
They hide it.
Still, the effort is joy,
one by one to keep uncovering NOT A DAY ON ANY CALENDAR
pearls in oyster shells.
Spring, and everything outside is growing,
even the tall cypress tree.
We must not leave this place.
UNFOLD YOUR OWN MYTH Around the lip of the cup we share, these words,
Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins? My Llle Is Not Mine.
Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?
Who comes to a spring thirsty
If someone were to pl~y music, it would have to be very sweet.
We're drinking wine, but not through lips.
and sees the moon reflected in it?
We're sleeping it off, but not in bed.
Who, like Jacob blind with grief and age,
Rub the cup across your forehead.
smells the shirt of his lost son
This day is outside living and dying.
and can sec again?
Who lets a bucket down and brings up Give up wanting what other people have.
a flowing prophet? Or like Moses goes for fire That way you're safe.
and finds what burns inside the sunrise? "Where, where can I be safe?" you ask.

Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies, This is not a day for asking questions,
and opens a door to the other world. not a day on any calendar.
Solomon cuts open a fish, and there's a gold ring. This day is conscious of itself.
Omar storms in to kill the prophet This day is a lover, bread, and gentleness,
and leaves with blessings. more manifest than saying can say.
Chase a deer and end up everywhere!
Thoughts take form with words,
An oyster opens his mouth to swallow one drop.
but this daylight is beyond and before
Now there's a pearl.
thinkine: and imal'inini'_ Those two
 they are so thirsty, but this gives smoothness This dipper gourd full of liquid,
to water. Their mouths are dry, and they are tired. upsidedown and not spilling a drop!

The rest of this poem is too blurry Or if it spills, it drops into God
for them to read. and rounds into pearls.

I form a cloud over that ocean

and gather spillings.
FLUTES FOR DANCING

It's lucky to hear the flutes for dancing

coming down the road. The ground is glowing.
After a day or two, lilies sprout,
The table set in the yard.
the shape of my tongue.
We will drink all this wine tonight
because it's Spring. It is.
It's a growing sea. We're clouds
over the sea,
The same wind that uproots trees
or flecks of matter
makes the grasses shine.
in the ocean when the ocean seems lit from within.
I know I'm drunk when I start this ocean talk. The lordly wind loves the weakness
and the lowness of grasses.
Would you like to see the moon split
Never brag of being strong.
in half with one throw?
The axe doesn't worry how thick the branches are.
It cuts them to pieces. But not the leaves.
THE SHAPE OF MY TONGUE
It leaves the leaves alone.
A flame doesn't consider the size of the woodpile.
This mirror inside me shows ...
A butcher doesn't run from a flock of sheep.
I can't say what, but I can't not know!
What is form in the presence of reality?
I run from body. I run from spirit.
Very feeble. Reality keeps the sky turned over
I do not belong anywhere.
like a cup above us, revolving. Who turns
I'm not alive! the sky wheel? The universal intelligence.
You smell the decay?
And the motion of the body comes
You talk about my craziness. from the spirit like a waterwheel
Listen rather to the honed-blade sanity I say. that's held in a stream.

This gourd head on top of a dervish robe, he inhaling-exhaling is from spirit,

do I look like someone you know? ow angry, now peaceful.
 Wind destroys, and wind protects. The young man felt he couldn't ask his serious question
in the crazy atmosphere, so he joked,
There is 110 reality but God, "I need to get married.
says the completely surrendered sheikh, Is there someone suitable on this street?"
who is an ocean for all beings.
"There are three kinds of women in the world.
The levels of creation are straws in that ocean. Two are griefs, and one is a treasure to the soul.
The movement of the straws comes from an agitation The first, when you marry her, is all yours.
in the water. When the ocean wants the straws calm, The second is half-yours, and the third
it sends them close to shore. When it wants them is not yours at all.
back in the deep surge, it does with them Now get out of here,
as the wind does with the grasses. before this horse kicks you in the head! Easy now!"
This never ends.
The sheikh rode off among the children.
The young man shouted, "Tell me more about the kinds of
women!"
THE SHEIKH WHO PLAYED WITH CHILDREN
The sheikh, on his cane horsie, came closer,
A certain young man was asking around, "The virgin of your first love is all yours.
"I need to find a wise person. 1 have a problem." She will make you feel happy and free. A childless widow
is the second. She will be half-yours. The third,
A bystander said, "There's no one with intelligence who is nothing to you, is a married woman with a child.
in our town except that man over there By her first husband she had a child, and all her love
playing with the children, goes into that child. She will have no connection with you.
the one riding the stick-horse.
watch out.
He has keen, fiery insight and vast dignity Back away.
like the night sky, but he conceals it I'm going to turn this rascal around!"
in the madness of child's play." gave a loud whoop and rode back,
The young seeker approached the children, "Dear father, calling the children around him.
you who have become as a child, tell me a secret." "One more question, Masted"
"Go away. This is not a day The sheikh circled,
for secrets." "What is it? Quickly! That riPer over there needs me.
"But please! Ride your horse this way, I think I'm in love."
just for a minute." "What is this playing that you do?
The sheikh play-galloped over. Why do you hide your intelligence so?"
"Speak quickly. 1 can't hold this one still for long. "The people here
Whoops. Don't let him kick you. want to put me in charge. They want me to be
This is a wild one!" judge, magistrate, and interpreter of all the texts.
The knowing I have doesn't want that. It wants to enjoy itself.
I am a plantation of sugarcane, and at the same time
I'm eating the sweetness."
Knowledge that is acquired
5,...;:t Feeling Separation:
is not like this. Those who have it worry if Don't Come Near Me
audiences like it or not.
It's a bait for popularity.

Disputational knowing wants customers.

It has no soul.
Robust and energetic
before a responsive crowd, it slumps when no one is there. We know separation so well because we've tasted the union. The reed
The only real customer is God. flute makes music because it has already experienced changing mud
Chew quietly and rain and light into sugarcane. Longing becomes more poignant if
your sweet sugarcane God-Love, and stay in the distance you can't tell whether your friend is going away or
playfully childish. coming back. The pushing away pulls you in.
Your face
will turn rosy with illumination
like the redbud flowers. SOMETIMES I FORGET COMPLETELY

Sometimes I forget completely

what companionship is.
Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, Unconscious and insane, I spill sad
absentminded. Someone sober energy everywhere. My story
will worry about things going badly. gets told in various ways: a romance,
Let the lover be. a dirty joke, a war, a vacancy.

Divide up my forgetfulness to any number,

it will go ;round.
These dark suggestions that I follow,
All day and night, music, are they part of some plan?
a quiet, bright Friends, be careful. Don't come near me
reed song. If it out of curiosity, or sympathy.
fades, we fade.
You do not need to read the marked out text below
MAN AND A WOMAN ARGUING

One night in the desert

a poor Bedouin woman has this to say
to her husband,
I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,

and the falling away. What is, 27 ,....::1 The Turn:

and what isn't. You who know
Dance in Your Blood
.Ielaluddin, You the one
in all, say who

I am. Say I
am You.
ON THE TURN

The "turn," the moving meditation done by Mevlevi dervishes, origi-

nated with Rumi. The story goes that he was walking in the gold-
smithing section of Konya when he heard a beautiful music in their
hammering. He began turning in harmony with it, an ecstatic dance
of surrender and yet with great centered discipline. He arrived at a
place where ego dissolves and a resonance with universal soul comes
in. Dervish literally means "doorway. " When what is communicated
moves from presence to presence, darshan occurs, with language in-
side the seeing. When the gravitational pull gets even stronger, the
two become one turning that is molecular and galactic and a spiritual
remembering of the presence at the center of the universe. Turning is
an image of how the dervish becomes an empty place where human
and divine can meet. To ap!Jroach the whole the part must become
mad, by conventional standards at least. These ecstatic holy people,
called matzubs in the sufi tradition, redefine this sort of madness as
true health.
When he saw the dervishes in Cairo in 1910, Rainer Maria Rilke,
the great spiritual poet of this century, said the turn was a form of
kneeling. "It is so truly the mystery of the kneeling of the deeply
kneeling man. With Rumi the scale is shifted, for in following the
peculiar weight and strength in his knees, he belongs to that world
in which height is depth. This is the night of radiant depth unfolded. "
December 17 is celebrated each year as Rumi's Wedding Night, the
night he died in 1273 and reached full unioll.
Inside water, a waterwheel turns. Walk to the well.
A star circulates with the moon. Turn as the earth and the moon turn,
circling what they love.
We live in the night ocean wondering,
Whatever circles comes from the center.
What are these lights?

I circle your nest tonight,

You have said what you are.
around and around until morning
I am what I am.
when a breath of air says, Now,
Your actions in my head,
and the Friend holds up like a goblet
my head here in my hands
some anonymous skull.
with something circling inside.
I have no name
for what circles
so perfectly.
No better love than love with no object,
no more satisfying work than work with no purpose.

If you could give up tricks and cleverness,

A secret turning in us that would be the cleverest trick!
makes the universe turn.
Head unaware of feet,
and feet head. Neither cares.
They keep turning. Some nights stay up till dawn,
as the moon sometimes does for the sun.
Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way
of a well, then lifted out into light.
This moment this love comes to rest in me,
many beings in one being.
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle's eye a turning night of stars. I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?

Look at your eyes. They are small,

but they see enormous things.
Keep walking, though there's no place to get to.
Don't try to see through the distances.
That's not for human beings. Move within,
but don't move the way fear makes you move.
When you feel your lips becoming infinite I have lived on the lip
and sweet, like the moon in a sky, of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
when you feel that spaciousness inside, knocking on a door. It opens.
Shams of Tabriz will be there too. I've been knocking from the inside!

The sun is love. The lover, Real value comes with madness,
a speck circling the sun. matzub below, scientist above.
A Spring wind moves to dance Whoever finds love
any branch that isn't dead. beneath hurt and grief

disappears into emptiness

with a thousand new disguises.

Something opens our wings. Something

makes boredom and hurt disappear.
Someone f-ills the cup in front of us.
Dance, when you're broken open.
We taste only sacredness.
Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the f-ighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you're perfectly free.
Held like this, to draw in milk,
no will, tasting clouds of milk,
never so content.

I stand up, and this one of me

turns into a hundred of me.
They say I circle around you.
Nonsense. I circle around me.