Coleman Barks Poetry Daily, 1/19/2009

I do not want the last thing I say to anyone 


to be how I feel something has gone cold in me 


and I don’t love you as much as I used to. 


You always want the truth, don’t you? 


Well that’s how it is with me at the moment. 


I don’t want that to be the last thing someone 


like you hears from me, and the way to make 

sure that does not happen is to not indulge 


any moments of mean, prideful self-critique, 


these failures of the heart to keep time in 


the dance we are set down in the middle of 


every day. Do not say it. Refrain, because 


just one small step-minute more and it will not 


remain true. It never stays long in that cold place, 


the heart, or if it has in your experience, don’t dwell 


on those examples. My father’s last words to me 


were Drive carefully. I can’t afford to lose 


anyone else. Mother had died some weeks earlier….

…My part in the Rumi phenomenon is slowing. 


I still love repainting the high desert caravanserai 


retreat cells of his poems, though sometimes 


I would rather be writing this wandering, which 


I claim has its own variety of kindness and 


sudden-looking-in. It is a way my dad did not 

have much interest in, or talent for. But I do 


claim too to be open to listening to other people’s 


difficulties, dilemmas, delusions, and delights, 


though I don’t go out hunting them as he did. 


I more enjoy scooting about like a zigzag 


waterbug above the motionless Chinese goldfish 


hung in the living jade of a shadow from where 


one of them may, one will, suddenly twitch 


and gobble me out of this talking any second.

“Wives” is a riveting hen-house of delight, a book based on subjects our society finds endlessly confusing — marriage, matriarchy, and Muhammad.  Finally, we get to meet the first women of Islam.

Tamam, thank you for doing this brave book.  —Coleman