notes to the beloved
by Arif K
the softness of friendship
melts into relationship
with the divine who beholds the inside
of a rose, spiraling through your eyes
& the silence which proceeds your beholding
gives plasticity to objects, to hate;
makes judgment melt in true friendship;
makes the knot in the heart unravel
& i wish to sense with the organ
of your art.
what does it mean to gaze in the mirror
of the true friend? to hold ones own
inmost gaze in the fire of mutual longing
for the divine. to rise
in seizing the kinetic God
& be stilled as possibilities
are felt in the vibrancy between
words which is the vibrancy of the heart
forged in a common
longing.
to yield to the beloved
who is near;
to be restored
to the heart’s law
is to expose the broken
fragments of the self as they sift
together in a common purpose
without devising a means to say
this or that is common, but common
ground unfolds as the fragments of a life
are scattered on an empty road
is where lightning strikes the final sense
of knowing where we are
going, if only to build a roof with tiles
of these fragments, each with a word that says
you are all this; i don’t know you
as you could be, or as i would like you to be
a roof is being
built from the aftermath
this over and over again building, a foundation
that caves in, the moment it is erected, & the clacking
branches scrape the roof & we are a tree upside down
bending backwards as though to reach each other before
we apprehend what we are reaching, the swallows forked
in thirds by the pond
& who will ever know what is meant in darkness
when roots are stopped by this kinetic response of air,
the air a tressel, which leaves a sense of knowing. we can at last
say we know the form of silence, that silence doesn’t brood
is not a premonition as it is a lisping of a name,
the name we lost in fear when we over & over built
a graveyard for yearning, with steel brackets. this foundation
moves like air & you are not far from letting these bricks fall
because you loved & let the structure fall.
in you, the eye, cleared of confusion
the eye, clarified in the heart
in you, deception dispelled
in you, morality, a stepping stone.
zeal has become clarified
& value is seized.
by you blessed, this eye
from which fish emerge on a pier
a star merged with a full moon &
a tower was illumined;
we fell into water & reemerged when the sky
darkened again; i climbed up the steps of my ancestry
& now this heartbeat in stone,
waiting to be touched by your hourglass.
when the heart is opened by the beloved, or when the fingers trace the heart;
there are lives within lives opening like russian dolls. occasionally, one catches
the fragrance of a distant rose, spiraled inward,
was the kernel Ramakrishna.
i found this way as stillness, inter
penetrating the physical, the physical
interpenetrating stillness.
the body infinitely stilled as it attempted to move
stillness, moving, as it remained free
in the light
of her devotion
whatever happens.
is the opening to read what has be encrypted in this body,
buried.
a message in a djinnless bottle.
that we held & feared.
to read. because we were numb.
with the sense of a life past.
& the wound of love will not heal.
& the heel is split by Achilles’ arrow.
& longing is an arrow splicing the air.
& the soul will rain down on our heels.
we read what is always being lost
is gained by the heart which forgives.
there is no falling.
heat will not make this hour.
the flowers skinned alive, petal by petal
fall on etched glass, where pain is malleable
and moving. the spinning center of your body,
still like a humming bird,
as the hourglass spins and this red festival
of fire falls, shorn from a distant memory. You do not
spin, and you have not spun; you are spinning
& i walk through
stillness like a knife.
I can be absent, neither do I spin, nor have I spun;
the arm curved up like a bow bend
with palm down turned to the earth & we are weaving
each other’s gravity.
when the beloved gazes though the lover’s eyes
what is blue and brown, but the symmetry of her hour
where colors melt in eyes touching, and invisible hands made
visible in muteness. i walk a spiral in your heart
and two moons are fused in one, a crescent and a pearl.
i am a fisherman and you are blue. i have no
thing to offer you, but this touch, where i disappear.
you gaze though me at yourself.
you are always only blue. i am brown like the earth
swathed in your sky blue utterance.
you are cosmos whirling wide
sea breezes on the turf of the tide rise up
like innumerable hands. Breezes bust the waves
and the space between your lips open and
the cedars rowed in the air,
your soul hovered above the glen, a gleaning
of who you once were,
and shall become when time is set in motion again.
you are above the bed post hovering
like angels above a cardinal’s bed of soot and sear, pristine,
i want to surrender to your silence which peels me.
– Arif K
(These are poems I wrote to the eternal beloved: heart-Chinmoy, Chinmoy-heart)