THE BLESSED CITY


Once inside the limits of this city,
One drops everything. The lion at the gate
Takes your bags. No welcoming committee
Asks questions, but goat girls wave recognition
And whole caravans slump on signal –
Like vertebrae on divans – to dump a freight
Which, threaded through the eye of the needle,
Is deemed too precious to be merchandise,
Being the very stuff of paradise.
So no custom or duty entrammels
The wry indifference of the camels
Who, after a journey of a hundred moons,
Across a desert more barren than the mind,
Come to a place like this, where no beast is driven,
Where sheep lead the shepherds to the manger,
And even the rats are kind.
Here the beggar deserves no pity
For to him here everything is given.
Nor need the noble stranger any introduction
For he finds here the same invisibility
He knew alone in the desert. He sits
Here as he walked there, in the shade
Of the wall as in the shadow of the beast.
And he who his own body so inhabits
This city opens its arcane court
Of noiseless laughter and eyeless sight:
A metempiric harlequinade
Of seer and seen in the House of Being.
That House is the refuge of every sort
Of thing: thought here has no center
But mind serves as exchequer to the king.
And tonight features a timeless masquerade.
Rich merchants and their wives, chiefs
Of every tribe and nation, surrender their beliefs,
Shell out, then enter, to be unmasked.
The oos and ahs of quiet recognitions
Are as the coos and cahs of doves and pigeons.
But he who doth alone in shadows sit,
Who waits regardless of pain or pleasure,
He his own life stands to inherit
And with it, this city’s heritage and treasure.
So let him enter last, when the room is empty:
Door ajar, a table set for one or two,
A single picture of the wall – a portrait
Of the king – but without a face.
So too is Man the frame for every trace.
In this first moment of just solitude,
Naked, muted and unmasked,
Stand ye here like a question asked:
And not hope in time his stake to seize.
There is time to drink at every tavern,
Time to reflect on the stone-carved frieze
That purls the gate. Look, there is Eve
Born from the tree, and Adam dignified.
Here is Abraham, knife at Isaac’s throat,
And there in the thicket the wayward goat.
Here Elijah wrestles with an angel
And there the barefoot carpenter is crucified
Again and again. Here, the ruins of the temple,
And there, the stone. See how on a night of power,
The last prophet rides al Buraq right up to heaven!
Where the Muslim and the  Jew,
And where crusading Christian pilgrim?
This is the city of light, a fortress
For the uncommitted, the unidentified.