Something Missing In My Heart

Daniel Ladinsky On The God-Intoxicated Poetry Of Hafiz

To any fully enlightened soul there is only God, or divine light and infinite knowledge. Any perfect poet — and I feel both Rumi and Hafiz were — experiences existence non-dualistically. They live as one. I don’t think they would see any difference between themselves. Any difference we might see is due to our transitory and distorted perception. Rumi, Hafiz, you, me — these are just costumes that came to life when the Beloved wiped his lips with us for whatever drunk, wild reason.

Already Falling

You think you can feel the peace in this room. A line from Matthew comes to you: “Forgive us as we forgive . . .” Something is happening here with the light and the birds and the wind outdoors: a transformation from despair to readiness. You call for your mother.

Essay In Which My Uncle Eddy And I Attend His Funeral

I want to ask Uncle Eddy how it could possibly be that he is sitting in my car as we drive through Katonah, New York, on the way to Danbury, but sometimes in life you just roll with what’s happening and try to make sense of it after it happens.

And So On

I always thought a kind of permanence awaited me in the future: I’d grow up, find my niche, and settle down. The questions of my youth would dissolve into a mature understanding of how the world works. But now I am a twenty-one-year-old woman fresh out of college with hazy goals of foreign travel and falling in love. A fear is roiling in me that I will never find peace and certainty.

This I Believed

I believed, even as a child, that I was being raised up in the right way to live. My family attended the local Seventh-Day Adventist church every Saturday. I sang songs about David and Goliath, and I belted out that I was “too young to march in the infantry” or to “ride in the cavalry” or to “shoot the artillery,” but not too young to serve “in the Lord’s army.”

Virtue Of The Month

I climb back in bed, rest my head on his chest. Spooned against the warm curl of his body, I feel the damp toads sleeping in the cave of my chest awaken. One by one, they hop away.

Kitchen Ghost

My husband killed himself in our kitchen, / a wide-open room with a forty-gallon barrel / of water standing close to the old woodstove.

Selected Poems

— from “With That Moon Language” | Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to / them, “Love me.” / Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise / someone would call the cops.

Twilight Meditation Without Dog

Late-afternoon light floods the darkening sunroom. / Looking out the window, not sad, not happy, I / and the ghost of my old dog breathe in, breathe out

Selected Poems

— from “I Stand in the Doorway” | Sometimes when you say goodbye you know it’s goodbye for keeps. / You touch your lips to her cheek, or you squeeze his hand & walk off. / What else can you do?