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xv N O T E S I N L I E U O F P R E F A C E In the late 1970s I had a dream of being in a bookstore.On the lefthand counter is a huge open book with raised gold type. It is in all languages—German, Arabic, Cherokee, Chinese—and mixed in with the different alphabets are musical signatures, algebraic signs, figures from physics. It is very beautiful . It is everything. It costs $700 and I happen to have that much on me. I feel a deep longing for it, but something rational comes over me. I reason that I will never learn all those languages, so I will never be able to read the book if I buy it. I turn away from that counter and from the miraculous book. In the center of the bookstore is a small performance area, with a lifesize wooden statue of Jesus. A monk in a dark hood is standing face to face with Jesus, pouring lighter fluid over his head and lighting it. As it flares up, he mumbles unintelligibly into the burning face. It is a ceremony called Embarrassing the Christ. I turn to the counter on my right where there is a stack of round emblems. I look through them. A girl, pointing over my shoulder, says That one is yours. It has a whisk broom at the top, a tiny down-feather in the center, and a yin-yang line down the center that becomes a road and then a shallow stream with two black dogs at the bottom, padding along, companionable in the splashing, hanging out, exploring things together. I aspire to the gait and taoist nonchalance of those two dogs. I certainly overthought the decision not to buy the golden book, but am glad the dream did not end with me walking out of the store owning that astounding tome. The dream feels like a life-dream, and it would not be my life if it had ended that way. Each of those scenes is probably an emblem for a stage in my life. I do adore whatever it is in consciousness (or outside of it) that gives us such dreams, and also what receives and remembers them, what writes them down devotedly. Then whatever it is that phrases them as splices for the wiring of a poem to keep the current moving . I love all that. But it is with the mystery that gives dreams that I would have more conversation. xvi n o t e s i n l i e u o f p r e f a c e I have always loved emblems. I had a strange collection of advertising logos as a child. I would cut them out of magazines and paste them in ledgers. Maybe this poetry collection is a continuation of that. There’s an emblem of how an aluminum canoe floats on stream water with no one in it. One showing how light is inside a fire and coming out of it too, onto our sleeping faces. One about how it feels to be a snake gliding out of its skin on an early summer day. Socrates lecturing from inside a hanging basket-cage. That last is not here. That is the wonderful emblem of what thinking looks like, from Aristophanes’ The Clouds. Socrates calls the basket his thinkery. Socrates walking free is what we’re after. Rumi suggests that we listen for presences inside poems. Say we are a lineage , a complicated layered presence, composed of all we have loved and all who have loved us. My beloved cousin, Tom Lamar. Dostoyevsky, Lao Tze. My crowd mixes with your crowd. Language, poetry especially, helps that converging of currents. I am continually amazed with the process.And now that Rumi has entered the room, you could say that he and Shams are luring us toward obliteration, into ever widening, deepening, skies of loving. Shams once said of Rumi that the writing came through him in three kinds of scripts: One that he could read and only he. One that he and others could read. And one that neither he nor anyone else could read. I am that third script. The presence of Shams Tabriz is the great mystery living inside Rumi’s poetry. The cave lion. Every poetry collection should have such a wild center , such a soul. We wait for some more alive presence to enter us, something that...

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