In the Presence of Absence

Have I had two roads, I would have chosen their third.

Far away, our dreams have nothing to do with what we do. The wind carries the night, and passes on, aimless.

I see a bird carrying me and carrying you, with us as its wings, beyond the dream, to a journey that has no end and no beginning, no purpose and no goal. I do not speak to you, and you do not speak to me; we listen only to the music of silence. Silence is the friend's trust of friend, imagination's self-confidence between rain and rainbow. A rainbow is inspiration provoking the poet, uninvited, the infatuation of the poet with the prose of the Quran. Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown? We are absent, you and I; we are present, you and I. And absent. Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown?

Are we what we do with time, or are we what time does with us?

Perhaps death is a metaphor to remind us of a secret of life we failed to notice.

I used to invent love when necessary. When I walked alone on the riverbank. Or whenever the level of salt would rise in my body, I would invent the river.

Had I known you, I would have possessed you, and had you known me, you would have possessed me. But then you and I would not be.

The image of love reveals itself there; in a profoundly present absence.

You, who only know love when in love, do not ask what it is, nor do you look for it. But when a woman once asked you if you were in love with love itself, you were evasive and escaped by answering: I love you. She persisted: Do you not love love? You said: I love you, because of you. She left you, because you could not be trusted with her absence. Love is not an idea. It is an emotion that can cool down or heat up. It comes and goes. It is an embodied feeling and has five, or more, senses. Sometimes it appears as an angel with delicate wings that can uproot us from the earth. Sometimes it charges at us like a bull, hurls us to the ground, and walks away. At other times it is a storm we only recognize in its devastating aftermath. Sometimes it falls upon us like the night dew when a magical hand milks a wandering cloud.

So which of your Lord’s favors do you two deny? You and I are absent, you and I are present and absent. So which of your Lord’s favors do you two deny?

Come with me tonight so that we might make tonight a shared past, says the one afflicted with longing. I will come with you to make a shared tomorrow, says the one afflicted with love. She does not love the past and wants to forget the war that has ended. He fears tomorrow, because the war has not ended and he does not want to grow older.

The only paradise we know through our senses and intuition is that of the beloved, and the only hell, disappointment in love.

A poet need not trouble himself if he lies. He lies only in the matter of love, as the regions of the heart are open to tempting conquest.