The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.

She loved him so much she concealed his name in many phrases, the inner meanings known only to her.

You had better run from me. My words are fire.

Where the lips are silent the heart has a thousand tongues.

The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was.

If you want to be more alive, love is the truest health.

Love is an open secret, the most obvious thing in the world and the most hidden, with no why to how it keeps its mystery.

A servant wants to be rewarded for what he does. A lover wants only to be in love's presence, that ocean whose depth will never be known.

There is little one can say about love. It has to be lived, and it's always in motion.

Someone who does not run toward the allure of love walks a road where nothing lives.

You could string a hundred endless days together, My soul would find no comfort from this pain. You laugh at my tale? You may be educated But you haven’t learned to love till you’re insane

A pen went scribbling along. When it tried to write love, it broke.

This is what love does and continues to do. It tastes like honey to adults and milk to children.

IGNORANCE I didn’t know love would make me this crazy, with my eyes like the river Ceyhun carrying me in its rapids out to sea,where every bit of shattered boat sinks to the bottom. An alligator lifts its head and swallows the ocean, then the ocean floor becomes a desert covering the alligator in sand drifts. Changes do happen. I do not know how, or what remains of what has disappeared into the absolute. I hear so many stories and explanations, but I keep quiet, because I don’t know anything, and because something I swallowed in the ocean has made me completely content with ignorance.

Don't make the body do what the spirit does best, and don't put a big load on the spirit that the body could easily carry.

The feelings trembled and flapped in his chest like a bird newly put in a cage.

THIS TORTURE Why should we tell you our love stories when you spill them together like blood in the dirt? Love is a pearl lost on the ocean floor, or a fire we can’t see, but how does saying that push us through the top of the head into the light above the head? Love is not an iron pot, so this boiling energy won’t help. Soul, heart, self. Beyond and within those is one saying, How long before I’m free of this torture!

From "Blasphemy and the Core" 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.

Let soul speak with the silent articulation of a face.

Are you jealous of the ocean's generosity? Why would you refuse to give this love to anyone? Fish don't hold the sacred liquid in cups! They swim in the huge, fluid freedom.

First, when I was apart from you, this world did not exist, nor any other. Second, whatever I was looking for was always you.

They fell to, on the ground. You’ve seen a baker rolling dough. He kneads it gently at first, then more roughly. He pounds it on the board. It softly groans under his palms. Now he spreads it out and rolls it flat. Then he bunches it, and rolls it all the way out again, thin. Now he adds water and mixes it well. Now salt, and a little more salt. Now he shapes itdelicately to its final shape and slides itinto the oven, which is already hot. You remember breadmaking! This is how your desire tangles with a desired one. And it’s not justa metaphor for a man and a woman making love. Warriors in battle do this too. A great mutual embrace is always happening between the eternal and what dies, between essence and accident.

Lovers move like lightning and wind. No contest. Theologians mumble, rumble-dumble, necessity and free will, while lover and beloved pull themselves into each other.

Your faces are very beautiful, but they are wooden cages. You had better run from me. My words are fire.

You’ve so distracted me, your absence fans my love. Don’t ask how. Then you come near. “Do not…” I say, and “Do not…,” you answer. Don’t ask why this delights me.

I Have Vanished In the early morning, A lover asked her beloved, “Do you love me more than yourself?” “More than myself? For sure I have no self any more— I am you already. The ‘I’ has gone; the ‘you’ has come about. Even my identity is gone. The answer is taken for granted. ‘You and I’ has no meaning. The ‘I’ has vanished like a drop into an ocean of honey.

Love is a madman, working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes, running through the mountains, drinking poison, and now quietly choosing annihilation.

What sort of person says that he or she wants to be polished and pure, then complains about being handled roughly?