POEMS GIVEN IN SILENCE Michael Mathias

Behold, My Blind Musicians
Play My Song of Unlimited Love!
Let The Poets become Living Poems
So that My Lovers will sing to Me.

I was praying in the Lagoon Cabin. My mother's blue silhouette appeared to me. Suddenly I realized she had died. She was standing in front of Baba's Chair.

O Mother, at the moment of your death, I heard your two last gasps, little china doll. I watched the green ooze trickle like a snake out of your rosy lips. "Mother! Mother!" I cried. You released your body in a wedding moment, breathless into my hands. I reached out for you. "Mother! Mother!" I cried. An emblem of the Bird fell out of the album of Baba's Family Letters. Baba's Chair was suffused in a strange lemon Light, spreading wide about me.

Then she disappeared into Baba's Fiery Free Form.

Baba said to me, "For the first half of your life you saw Me under the Veil of your mother. Now I am lifting that Mask which is your mother, so that you can see Me face to Face. Witness to My Fiery Free Form." These words come through me, pounding through me in spasms...my whole body rocks. Future folds in on the Present. My mother's blue silhouette...your absence astounds...wounds...my whole body rocks. I hear the words as if through a Cosmic Mouth! My pen moves ahead...I can't keep up...too fast, too fast. Baba, I can't keep up. Why did you send me the Sign of the Bird? I did not know what I was writing. Tears flowed through me for days and days. Died...Died...Mother died? An emblem of the Bird fell out...why did she fly from me? Why did you take her from me, Baba!

I ran out weeping to the Original Kitchen with the wet fragments...my mentor Darwin Shaw, who held Baba's Stone in his hand, was sitting on one side of the kitchen and Lyn Ott, the blind painter of Baba's Face, sat near the Lagoon window. Baba had set up a force field of Energy. I could see their hearts lift with His Golden Light...whirring sounds of the Om...a force-field of Energy between my two mentors...me caught in the middle...powerful magnets pulling my heart in opposite directions. "It will break, Baba, it will break." "Had I known, oh had I known, I never would have given them the secret of the Bomb!" says Einstein. "I will break your heart into a million pieces so it can hold the Heart of the Universe. The Atom Bomb of My Presence," Baba says. Was it the death of the President...the skull split open...that froze time in Aeneas Song? "My Silence is more powerful than Nuclear Bombs!"

I did not know what I was writing...these wet drafts, blurred with my tears. "These are Michael's previous lives with Baba," Darwin said to Kitty Davy and Jane Haynes, directors of the Center. "And Aeneas, too, singing of the death of the President." I did not know consciously what I was writing at the beginning. "You dared to hug the masses, you opened the bubble dome of the your car. You stood up and bared your lion's neck to the Sun, hugging with hubris, the maddened roar. You opened your neck, your juggler vein, to the maddened waves, to the teeth of the crowds' envy...to their bloodthirsty greed." I did not know "My life is the Poem."

They shall praise Me all the day long
And at night be transfigured into My Song.

For as the Musicians surrender their fingers unto Me,
They see neither notes nor bars
But the Unlimited Music of My Presence.

I did not see what I was writing. I saw only Baba's Unlimited Light. He held the torch high for Baba, Dennis McCabe running half-naked...the flecked light of cypress trees...the fierce light of the crescent sun...lashing his back, his chest. I heard the words spoken. He carried the torch for Baba at Amartithi...three mile run towards His Tomb. Baba comes down to us in a Body...I felt the words as Music passing through my body, my chest, my heart...through all the bodies of His Centers of Love. He dances like a deer through the forest. Why, then, would the pose of a statue seen through the prism of the human figure evoke an emotional response in the audience? These statues were embodiments of some higher good outside of man himself, in fact, representations of spiritual existences, of gods immortal...to the mortal, perishing organs of sight.

McCabe running....my fingers, too, up and down the keyboards at Julliard...His sculptured form... my poetry in massive chords...mannered behavior Aeschylus imposed upon the human form...the Greek Chorus. His Fiery Free Form, Dr. Kenmore's office, 1968...the desire to unite with physical form and the desire for the good and eternal are commingled in a gestural act of worship in which mankind embraces not only the form but the Idea within the form...only now He is Music...achieving a state of Grace by this superimposition of Idea and Form...to the Greek mind might have been the primal manifestation of the religious impulse towards art, in which the arts acted together in a synthesis to bring men into a state of Grace...only now He is Music...Rutgers Doctoral Dissertation...Baba is speaking to me as Music...the Lagoon Cabin now tilting like a Telephone Booth...Dennis McCabe outside raking leaves. "Yes, Baba came down to us in His Body, but I see Baba in His Fiery Free Form...these words testify." Time eddying and circling like waves in the Lagoon Cabin...Einstein in a Telephone Booth...the walls disappear into His Fire. Poems Given in Silence.

"God comes down to us in a Body, but I see Him in His Fiery Free Form!" The workers laughed.

Tears flowed for days and days. "Was it the death of the President...the skull split open...that froze time in Aeneas' Song?" They raked the leaves and laughed. "Was it from these roots of blood that Telephone Booths grew?" They laughed and made the crazy sign. "Steel, black mushrooms in the ruins of American dreams." I hang the poems on the walls...the workers take them down. "We keep trying to throw them away. He spreads them under our rakes. Unsigned."

Peggy Newell, wife of the singer, Jamie Newell, runs to Jane and Kitty, the Center directors, "We've got problems with Michael in Boston. New lovers coming to Baba pick up these fragments on the Stationery of the Bird. They think Baba wrote them because Michael takes off his name and instead at the bottom of these circulars, this strange emblem of the Bird. You tell Michael to stop!" We throw them away and a half hour later there's more on the floor of the Lagoon Cabin...like a fast Charlie Chaplin movie...we take them down. He puts them up. We take them down again. He's hung them all over the kitchen note boards...over the telephone...under Baba's Chair...under Baba's Bed...even on Baba's Pillows...in the Boat House, he reads them to the alligators! Mankind shall scatter my Poems like leaves in the whirlwinds. "Well, Michael is a very strong Poet," Jane cautioned them. "Very strong!" They laughed. "O gone, gone, you cannot go home anymore."

They are blinded by Me.
Only I see
Where their fingers must go.

(Vision, Bk. II, p. 86)

Then I ran to Baba's Bedroom and buried my face in Baba's Bed. I wept into the bedspread and heard the bed singing the Om sound. The singing was all around, like the singing of a thousand birds. Then I realized the singing was coming from outside the bedroom. I walked out and saw a hundred Sufis from Washington surrounding Baba's Bedroom, singing like morning birds. And there was Peggy Muir, her scarf blowing in the wind, beckoning me into the circle, "Come into the circle! Come into the circle. You are one of Baba's own!"

Andrew Muir said, "You are invited to join us in a symbolic feast, an old Sufi tradition, but first would you like us to share with you the same walk that we had with Baba in the 1950s? We'll take you on that same walk, step by step. Come, walk with your family!"

And then like a child
I follow the Family.
The walk is like the call of a bird
Softly, stepping on sunlight
Softly, on muted leaves
The footsteps of the old disciples
The footsteps of the Family following after
The purring procession on Baba pathways
The footsteps singing
The clear notes of the morning birds
Clear, translucent, frangible.
Where have I heard footsteps like these?

(Vision, Bk. III, p. 41)

I walked with Andy and Peggy and the Sufi singers followed behind us. Andy and Peggy narrated each moment of their walk with Baba, repeating the thoughts they had shared with Him. I was blinded by their voices, which dazzled my ears like music. Each step I took seemed to glide me back in time until I was actually experiencing Meher Baba on that original walk through Myrtle Beach.

Behind me, around me,
Footsteps without faces,
Footsteps of friends, lovers
From forgotten lifetimes,
Footsteps naked singing into Meher Baba's Room.
I hear footsteps singing around me,
The clear notes of the morning bird,
And suddenly from everywhere and nowhere
The voices of the Family break into Sunlight!

A circle of morning birds,
Sun-dazzled,
Calling the lovers
To the breast of the Beloved!

(Vision, Bk. III, p. 44)

We sit on the porch together...take off our shoes. I look into the darkness. Baba's Chair is still there...the ropes vanish. Andy leads me into the Barn and points to exactly where Baba was sitting when they entered His Presence. Andy reflects, "I don't remember how I got there...don't remember walking...as if I floated over to where Baba was...literally fell into his arms. He seemed so tiny...almost as if both man and woman. I collapsed into His embrace and lost consciousness of all time and space...don't know how long I was there."

Sun-Blazoned
Beyond Vision
Beyond Seeing

Rotations of the Sun-Dazzled Eye!

Aeneas comes into the Presence of the Avatar,
Neither male nor female as He approaches.

        White Turbulence of Light!
        Blazing Silence spirals up
Speaking in hieroglyphs
His Hands Moving in the air
        dance like birds
        like tines, eddying and swirling...
Who could speak in this singing scintillation?

The Musician's Hands conduct him forth;
Aeneas fell into a measureless Music
Into a symmetry of Silence singing into Now.