Desire Quartet

1.

“God is in himself so exalted that he is beyond the reach of either knowledge or desire. Desire extends further than anything that can be grasped by knowledge. It is wider than the whole of the heavens, than all angels, even though everything that lives on earth is contained in the spark of a single angel. Desire is wide, immeasurably so. But nothing that knowledge can grasp or desire can want, is God. Where knowledge and desire end, there is darkness, and there God shines.”

~ Meister Eckhart

The difference, if it exists at all,
between the common man and the saint,
might merely be to what degree one thinks
of reasons for complaint, while the other
knows in heart and mind there are none.

Take Desire, for example:

It’s judged by some as a deadly trap,
and hence it tends to get a bad rap.

From another angle of vision, however,
desire could be appreciated as a loving gift
the Source of desire grants itself so it can play
as two-not-two in games of being and becoming,
separation and reunion, lover and beloved.

Summer winds sift through a lifted window,
lazily drifting across our playful concupiscence
with neither judgment nor disdain.

We smile and fall into each other –
free of the past, the present, the future.

This is how to recognize the motion of light
for the superb artistry it is –

one unseen breeze ignites a thousand poems,
and desire comes full circle.

Hunger and satisfaction both,
we murmur no complaint –

life need not be in conflict with itself,
clinging to either purity or taint.

Desire brought us here, desire
sweeps our fragrant petals airborne
in winds of impersonal intent.

In the letting go,
it fulfills its purpose,
and everything sighs with joy.

While this soft morning breeze
scatters God as prasad over the fertile fields
of its own innocent yearning, we will float
in the transparent womb of unspeakable
light, ovulating new incarnations.

2.

“As is your devotion, so is your liberation.” ~ Bhagavan Nityananda

Everyone can understand happiness.

Everyone knows exactly what it’s like
to be perfectly happy –

how else to account for the common
and uncommon pursuit of it?

If we didn’t already know happiness,
how would we know what to search for?

If we don’t know the treasure,
why instigate the hunt?

On the other hand, if already known,
why seek it, why not simply . . .
be it?

This happiness of ours is not
any known ecstasy of body or mind,
nor does it exclude any ecstasy of body/mind.

We know this by letting go of knowing –
discarding all that merely passes through
and obscures our original innocence
in desire’s brief masquerades.

Our fluid union is the drowning point of knowing
in the waterfall of the mysterious unknown.

We live there, pooling into a vibrant living energy
no poet can dream words for, nor scholar analyze.

Everyone lives there, but most imagine
they are living someplace other, someplace
that reciprocally supports a sense of being
a someone with yet some other place
that they would rather be.

Not we –
you are the exquisite presence
of the Mystery to me, right here,
right now, before and after forever!

This Mystery can take the form
of an unbounded ecstasy by reincarnating
as everyone and everything, just as they are.

It’s simply that we like to return the favor
by letting what is simply be what it is,
and refrain from interfering.

I see you, you see me.
Tongues touch.

There is general agreement, then
it becomes more specific.

We drink each other up
like eucharistic wine.

Since we were made for each other,
we honor the Designer by disappearing
into this irresistible Design.

Over and over and over again,
we lose ourselves where
the Woodbine twine!

 

 

3.

“The way you make Love is the way God will be with you.” ~ Rumi

I begin by simply appearing as myself,
already in Love with you –

you appear to me as myself,
already always Love.

This is immensely arousing.

In the mutuality of our magnetic attraction
we are drawn into the monosyllabic vernacular
of this loving, the bodily bliss of original desire,
a synchronous release of primordial desire
into our immortal bodiless-ness.

The body does not resist.

Death is irresistible –
it is a bliss of the body.

It dies into itself, this moment,
moment, moment . . .

This is what it wants –
this satisfaction of all wanting,
this unspeakably beautiful death.

Tongues dance with each other in a language
tenderly translated by the hands to touch,
the breath to commingling light, skin
grown taut yet supple, sheening,
hearts ablaze with keening,
bodies shining towards
each other, blinding
each other in light’s own desire,
the play of mindless embodiment,
consciousness yielded to its own bliss.

We let go as it expands, yielding the fruit
of its own deliciousness, the suchness
of this first kiss, this messenger of bliss,
flesh to fire, fuel for fire, fire spinal,
full frontal flame, rising, brilliantly,
into a rare consuming darkness
for which there is no name.

We are not becoming God,
God is becoming us.

The way we make love
is the shape of our divinity –
something selfless slides into itself,
we disappear, washed clear in the tidal
streaming light brimming from our soul eyes –

I know you, there is only one,
you are the one not afraid, not other
than what moves exquisitely in ancient rhythm,
ancient rhyme, knowing without knowing . . .

You are me, Beloved.
Beloved, I am You.

4.

At night if I feel a divine loneliness I tear the doors off Love’s mansion and wrestle God onto the floor. He becomes so pleased with Hafiz and says, “Our hearts should do this more.”

~Hafiz

If you’re longing tonight for this rapture, here –
let me bring it to you, an offering
at your altar of desire.

I will worship there by stretching myself
so plushly over your innocent longing
you will plead,

“Don’t stop!”

I won’t. I can’t.

You are too beautiful
to resist!

Loving this suchness of you,
I am drawn to the heat of your serene
intensity, your breathless magnetism, the call
of your wanting, wanting to be free of this wanting,
not wanting anything but this, to never be spilt from
this drowning, this fragrance inescapable, the touch
indelible on the heart, the taste of sweet spring
water gushing, rushing to itself with arms
wide open, pulsing electric with that
for which we’ve ever yearned.

I place my head in the hollow
of your chest, and See.

What I see, you Are.

What you see
looking back at you,

I Am.

Between these two
no space exists, no time,
no memory, no wanting –

This love has become
the verb of our eternal glance,
a transmission without distance,
the word that breaks the trance.

These songs of love
offered for all sentient beings –

music trailing behind
the vanishing forms of us,

softly crying

“YES!”

The Sound of Me with You

Beloved,

there’s a poem I cannot write —
I just don’t have the words.

What lyrics could fit themselves
into a silence that swallows
each one of them before
they reach an ear?

This song came before any ears,
before tongues started moving.

It is the poem
that I cannot write,
and so I hum, and thus
become this wordless humming,
even as you would too, and so,
obligingly, you do!

We hum together, me and you,
these sounds out of our own silence;

we rhyme —
one word’s enough for two –

one sound me, one sound you!

See, we belong together!

It works, it hums, and so
we become one singing poem,
no longer merely made-up words,
not a thing that one can hear or not,
sing or not, or say except with silence.

Still, away we hum, not knowing
one song from the next, just tunes
to instantly forget, while sweetly
captivated by the next –

a cavalcade of greatest hits,
played again for the ones
we missed.

There’s a poem song
always humming through us,
not a memory or tingling sensation,
no refrain from some gone-by day –

just the bliss
of what we cannot say,
and yet we say it anyway,
the word that goes unspoken,
the same way we go too,
a hum of rest in motion –

the sound of me with you.

~b

I realize my Heart has torn off layers,
layers of something I can taste,
like tears flowing, as if I am
the heartbreak of all mankind
flooding across the world,
crying for a Love
never known.

As we bask in Grace,
Love speaks as Light:

Sound and Song break into Dance,
Dance breaks into Breath, and
I breathe only Love, Love
for you, Sweet Darling.

I break the rules of everything,
break the hearts of everyone
who ever dared Loved me . . .

and I would do so again and again
just to be with You now, rolling
together in this holy moment.

Oh my Love! I realize at last
with you guiding me, I am
the release of fear, if
any fear arises.

Just to lay next to You at night
and hear You sigh, to listen
to Your Heart’s soft cadence
matching beats to mine –

I would die for that,
my Love!

Your Love hums
mantras into my being
and everything becomes You,
the Beloved One, my Darling Heart,
I am drowning, drowned, gone under
the waves of pure Grace in You.

I am the Taste of Light
upon your tongue-buds, upon
your eye-shawls, everywhere upon
your self …. Beloved!

Standing alone
I stand with You,
You the Beloved One,
and there is none other,
nothing and no one at all.

Say it again, Honeyed Sweet Lips,
for I am so filled with the nectar of
this Loving, I could say something
that will stop God in his tracks, and
our constant acts of Love will show it.

I know it.
It’s already Said.

I Love You.

~Mazie

9/17/03

How We Are

I worship
at the full tableau
of a tantalizing heart-sound,
an evocation wail effect offered up
to me from you, from me to you . . .

Hu!

Desires transmute into a holiness
in this singular endless moment – the tip
of your sacred wafer tongue touches mine,
turning my limbs and life force into a liquid light.

There is no me, no you, and
no wonder that I wander wide-eyed,
unaware of shame, soul-naked and taken
to a timeless awareness where everything and
everyone is aflame with the fierce power of Love.

Some will perhaps scoff at my wild Lover’s talk.

There’s no map to illustrate any of this,
and there is no route written down
to get here where we’re at,
no word of mouth
to find us out.

What we bring
to this table cannot be said.

What we receive is unspeakable.

The cumuluscious cloud-seeds of our rapture
ripple ever outward, ever inward,
and everywhere we look
is rain-soaked in
our bliss.

We are eclipsed of even this
in the eruption of a brightness piercing
through and through both me and you, into God,
plunging past all futures, all pasts, now, always.

I breathe in and you breathe out;
my heart’s upbeat to your heart’s downbeat
in beautiful blood-song gong-sound notes.

We are pressed together like autumn leaves,
as awe and wonder in a memory-book
written out in spinal column symmetry.

In a passion-filled lotus-prayer, I
unfold before your beautiful, sacred body altar,
surrendered in the remembrance of who we are.

We are anointed in a Fathomless Love,
in a quicksilver light surge, igniting
and striking us evermore brightly,
shining with a delight and
grace-filled glory . . .

Something beyond
human knowledge or power
shoulders us beyond the gods’playing field.

I worship at the spirit tableaux
of a scintillating heart spill,
an evocative thrill-sound
offered up to us from
the Love we are . . .
becoming.

~Mazie

Here is how we are:

Spooned together, we lay
blended, suspended, floating
horizontal in an infinite room filled
with luminous signs of our own design.

Vast spaciousness, no boundary –
we drift slowly out from the density
of our two bodies and into our etheric third,
the one living us now as how we are, the one
without center or circumference, the one before
even, before odd, before all the words we use for God.

Now we are ready, because
ready now is how we are, tuned
together, sifted into this blend without
end, when softly the wind chime chimes,
so suddenly that everything we are, were, or
will be falls perfectly into itself, fitted precisely
into place in space, as if nothing ever really fell.

Sleepily, we catch rumors of that falling.

Our invisible body moves, liquefies,
utterly bereft of any two-ness now,
loving itself increasingly sweetly,
each sigh in our room a sutra for
souls that pause and breathe
it all in, all of it.

We make the sign of how we are,
the sign of love that can’t be known,
for this is how we are, just as we have
always been, and what may have seemed
some space in time that dreamed itself
between us, some illusionary distance,
of which now there is no trace,
beyond all that –

here we are, as we are,
face to face.

~b

11/25/02

Flick of the Wrist

Beloved,
once it seemed
we lived far more than
just a thousand miles away,
but then I saw you dancing
amidst whirling skirts of words
and what they don’t say, can’t say,
yet still were said so clearly, there
was no option but to take you up
on your reminder to remember
what we never can forget –

LoveAlways.

On Cold Mountain
we lifted our hands high,
praising the stars flickering and fading
like glowing fireflies going dim in glass jars.

Collecting radiance and sparkle
in our palms pressed into the snow,
our feet tread lightly on the frozen grass
greeting us with “Gassho.”

Under moons that long ago
sunk into the sea of Light,
we walk together, side by side,
whispering Om throughout the night.

Those thousand miles and thousand lives
that passed through us like a vanishing mist
are just another Dance with You, Beloved,
called by the flick of a Beautiful Wrist.

~Mazie

Silence wants to sing something through us,
something about these hearts being
pregnant with God, and wanting
one more hour in the day
just to love one hour
more.

Shall we let it sing?
As if we had a choice!

Even when we dream at night,
it’s there behind the dreaming,
even the nightmares too.

We may awaken and complain
about our bad dreams, but
still we are curious,
curious about
the dream.

When we get curious about the Dreamer,
a bell rings in a spirit temple, and all our ghosts
look up from their morning papers.

They find their coffee intriguingly flavored
with our sweet love tears, our yearning
spread like happy jam all over
their dry ghost toast.

One by one they pass through us
like a sleepy hand reaching for the body
of its lover, only to slip through the mattress,
gliding into dimensions no human can conceive.

We are that hand, reaching into time and space
to touch ourselves to see if we are real.

The energy that lifts Mira’s mountain
is the same force that fuels every phantom hand.

One wrist flicks, one hand claps, and all the cosmos
cracks up, lifts up laughing, loving this silent sound
of the Beautiful One, clapping us into the labor
that’s eternally birthing Itself.

We’ve even got pictures nobody can see –
for ghosts they’re expensive,
for you they are free!

~b

10/26/03

Awake and Dreaming of This Perfect Way

This Perfect Way of being with you knows no true obstacle, once we accept that we are being perfectly lived exactly as we are, with no need for any struggle to become what that already is — what we already are.

Our true nature manifests itself when we harbor no thought for or against, and thus it is free to function unhindered, revealing the full radiance of our loving spontaneity in the miraculous feat of simply appearing here at all!

To imagine that any of this appearance is a matter of personal will can then be enjoyed as a humorous spoof, a fun way to play at make believe.

We do not seek to find the truth — we are merely no longer eager to cherish opinions, and so the truth naturally unfolds as this innocent flower of Union.

When we consider these matters together, we are pierced with the most intense love for each other. This makes us very happy, happy as happy can be!

Our unique individualities are outshone by that which we know to be indivisible. Still, duality has a lot to offer, so we can appreciate the game!

Undisturbed by ripples in the dream, the ten thousand paradoxes no longer preoccupy us. We have abandoned all judgments of pro versus con to those for whom such pursuits still elicit some enthusiasm.

Letting go, we leave things as they are. What’s difficult is grasping and avoiding, so we take the easy way.

There are those who go about as if there is some absence of this kiss, yet all the while ten thousand lips are brushing tenderly against our heart, kissing from the inside out, healing any sense of absence – what better purpose to be lips?

Attendant only to the whisper of the Heart, we bear no prejudice for or against the senses. Whereas in the Dharma itself there is no individuation, we have no complaint about purity or taint. What’s real is real in the midst of all appearances, experiences, and virtual charades!

The wise may have no likes or dislikes, but we are fools for Love and so play in the world as if there are two. It’s fun to dress up, but we don’t forget that we are not our costumes!

Gain and loss, right and wrong, past and future — we tossed those dice from the Rainbow Bridge and then enjoyed the sunset. Empty and marvelous!

The ultimate destination of things, beyond which nothing can go, is like sweet fresh bird song greeting us each dawn. Good Morning, Playmate – what game shall we play today?

Everything is empty, lucid, and self-illuminating. There is no strain, no effort needed to fall forever in this Love we are. Let’s do it again and again!

It no longer matters to us how things are conditioned, whether by being or non-being. What silly concepts! What is, is the same as what is not. That which is not is the same as what is. Simple enough – forget about it!

If only this is remembered, we need not concern ourselves with being perfect! We can be as we are, without requiring anything to be other than it is too.

This is a Great Mystery. Beyond it, we cannot say. We can only nod, hold hands, and smile in heartfelt gratitude at such a Perfect Way!

~b

 

 

 

 

 

I awoke in the night ecstatic with light, and all I could fathom, all that I could see in my Heart’s mirror was You lying next to me.

My Heart broke at Your peaceful countenance, so calm and so beautiful and so lost I became in Loving You that I entered into a state o the most sublime communion commingled with a happy joyousness, and I experienced this with You even while you were sleeping, dreaming of the wonderfully good fortune that has shined on You and I as Grace.

We sleep Cheshire-like, smiling like two cats, cats who have just guzzled up the proverbial canary and couldn’t be more satiated or satisfied.

I sat in the bed last night, leaning on one arm and looking straight into Your face, which was fairly glowing with a bliss I recognized well.

I listened to the cadence of Your breath moving softly in and then out, and I was pierced with the realization that You are alive, in flesh and form, breathing and with a heart beating to some unfathomably sweet song and that You Love me and I Love You, completely and unconditionally.

I remained transfixed and transformed in this understanding of OneHeart.

The tears sprang to my eyes like hot sparks and I thought my heart would burst or implode or just simply dissolve — the entire scene of Beauty and Love igniting — and there would be nothing left to imply or hint that we were even here.

But I can still hear the sound of Your breath in my ear — supreme bhajan — and I am broken and I can barely bear the Beauty that You Are, my Love!

We are nightly falling, falling into a blissful breakthrough while sleeping, and there is nothing that can break our fall as we tumble like stars into the Glassblower’s Breath of Absolute Silence.

~ Mazie

10/25/2003

Grace

To discover myself
I trusted Grace.

Grace
knew what to do –

I didn’t have one blessed clue
until Her arrow pierced me through, and
then a river poured forth, a gracious kindness
water offers to dust, nourishing the thirsty forms,
all forms the fruit of nature’s indifferent felicity, timed
before time to arrive and evaporate with the suddenness
of my own appearing, again and again, discovering myself in
birth and death, forgetting myself in that parade of appearances,
ephemeral forms of myself streaming, borne along on a river of grace,
leading me at last to you, you to me, fluidity, I needed that, to discover
you, to see you, to touch you, to die in you and then again be born in you,
the one who was never other than myself, discovering me, reflecting love
back to itself as the seamless revelation of all that’s true, of two-not-two,
and ever shall remain by grace the laughing eyes in the dearest face,
the flood at the heart you stir in me, the rapture of communion,
lovingly cradling us to the grave and beyond, not here
or there or anywhere else that could ever be
anything other than the feeling
of Grace expanded
to infinity.

Osamu

(Night Work)

The moon is
rising swiftly tonight,
as if it can barely wait, as if
this will be the last and only time,
a last and only chance to be fully seen,
fully appreciated for the transparency of
presence pulsing in the lunar song it sings,
spreading in exquisitely reflected light
so bright along the horizon.

Behind the light, dreaming’s doors
are thrown open to the pathless sky,
the space in which this moon and I arise,
the stage on which we dance tonight.

We ourselves are being danced in a darkness
where all emerges and dissolves, with nothing else
to do but shine and disappear in a way for which
no words apply, and nothing can compare.

Just one taste of this dark elixir
can drown two sorrows –
self and other.

It seems that I’ve spent
innumerable lifetimes patiently carving
intricate designs in the evening air with every
moon-spun heartbeat, the same air you emerge from
now, lighter than air, lighter than any word for air,
so imperceptible at first, a cool calypso made of air.

Somewhere adrift in this moon-lick kiss of night
I’m sifted into, unaware of the hunt I’m prey for,
I am blinded by the light of you, as clear as the air
I carved you from, dear as the air you wrap me in,
afloat, serene, in moonshine’s breathless radiance.

And now, how fine our breathing blends, bending space
into one breath that whispers us into being, while
you stretch like a thin thread of pale moonshine
across the bare haunch of a crouching hunter
that’s patiently waiting to take its prey.