The Lover's Tailor's Shop: tomorrow I'll go there
wrapped in my long cloak, with a hundred yards of madness.

The Tailor snips you from Jones and stitches you to Smith,
pairing you with one, separating you from the other,
sew your heart to one of them for a liftime --
such silken thread! wonderful stitches!
miraculous hand!

Then, when your heart is fixed, he rips out the seam,
snick! snick! With the scissors of "Get ye down from it!"*

All this sewing together and tearing apart
bewilders me,
my mind reels at the variegations of
affirmation and obliteration.

The heart is a dust-board, He the geometer
of the heart:
what a marvel of figures, numbers, realities,
and names he inscribes!

When He multiplies you, like a number,
by somebody else,
what a sum He manifests with his arithmetic!

You've seen multiplication -- now study division:
how He parcels up one drop into an Ocean!

By the algebra of Fate He balances all equations:
Silence! for thought itself breaks down at such wonders.

(Translated by Peter Lamborn Wilson)


* Quran 11:38. God's command to Adam and Eve.