Coattails Of The Saint Poems

COATTAILS OF THE SAINT - is a collection of poems which chase after the coattails of sanctity, in this world with its "meanings set up as images" (a Sufi definition of what we take around us as reality), and those souls living among us right now and forever who have had bestowed upon them that dimension of sanctity which sets them apart while making them at the same time true human beings. Imagination has given these poems a "saintly" thread, with no particular saint in any traditional pantheon meant, but rather that essence of simple sainthood of which we are all (God willing) capable.

Sufi poems from the love-ocean, washing at the shores of this world and the next, with God willing a depth charge or two to find new love grottos, new heights in underwater drownings, new depths in aerial flights. Contradictions? As Walt Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Yes, I contradict myself! I contain multitudes." And if we rub the self to its tissue-thin reality, God's Light shines more thoroughly through.

Poetic inspiration continues to be a mystery to me, but I am its deep advocate, and hold to its irrational and shady acreage like a greedy real estate developer gazing out over the possibilities (a ramshackle hut here, a barn there, a castle with a lake yonder...). Is it angels, djinn, my black cat curled at the bottom of my bed while I'm hot in composition mode? My "unconscious," "God Consciousness?" (my fervent prayer).

A grand outgoing, heading directly into the puzzlement, the puzzle, puzzling it all out... Poems of search and devotion to the One, through labyrinthine manifestations... self and its various sheddings.

There are among us luminous beings who maintain that what we might taste of the Garden of Paradise and what we might suffer of the Fire of Hell is right here in our present earthly and mortal existence as well. The imaginal truth of the Spiritual Path that points to the Next World after death is perhaps indisputable (however some might vigorously dispute it) but our lives, upon reflection, sometimes thrown overboard and barely making it to shore, sometimes buoyed up very high and slammed down very low and hard, are a living proof of the this-world tasting of the Next World experience...

.".".The look of love death has on its face and in its fathomless eyes as behind the burning irises legions upon legions of angels file up and down a spiraling staircase carrying love-notes and bringing back blessings and reprieves..."" I'm really not sure why this particular collection of my poems is called Blood Songs, the title it has had since beginning the first poem of the book written in October of 2000, and though, as with other titles of mine, not necessarily threading a theme throughout, yet the title stands notwithstanding... and so it stands.

As Muslims who pray the five obligatory prayers each day of our lives, when able we orient ourselves toward Mecca, located in what is now Saudi Arabia, from wherever we happen to find ourselves, farflung in some island fastness, or out in desert dunes, or in a New York hotel room. There are boat people who tie up and face Mecca right in their boats, saintly Moroccan merchants who fling their carpets down just behind the counter where they sell embroidery thread to very particular customers (I am a witness). We can't get too "far out" when we stop to face Mecca five times and more a day, or in the solitude of our nights, knowing the plumb line goes straight through to the next world, and its rising to the holy heights.

MILLENNIAL PROGNOSTICATIONS: This is not a book of poetic futuristics, oracle-like I-Ching countings or consciousness Tarot readings, nothing so formal nor formulated. Perhaps its "prognostication" aspect is in trying to be open-hearted and sense-aware of images and their meanings, or meanings and their images, as they occur in the world both most immediate to us and by extension universal and even cosmic, detail by detail, focusing on what Blake called "minute particulars." It's a kind of lengthy prayer with sidebars, digressions and returns, hopefully each time more earnestly to the Source of all and of Whom, as it was said by the Prophet Muhammad, peace of Allah be upon him, "Do not curse time, for time is Allah..."