unmarked boxes

I keep reaching for Rumi.  I always want to share the poems here but then think they're too idiosyncratic to appeal to others.  But I keep reaching for Rumi when I feel lost so here is this...

"Unmarked Boxes" from The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne (line breaks somewhat different because of Typepad limitations.)

Don't grieve.  Anything you lose comes round in another form.  The child weaned from mother's milk now drinks wine and honey mixed.

God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell.  As rainwater, down into the flowerbed. As roses up from ground.  Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish, now a cliff covered with vines, now a horse being saddled.  It hides within these, till one day it cracks them open.

Part of the self leaves the body when we sleep and changes shape.  You might say, "Last night I was a cypress tree, a small bed of tulips, a field of grapevines."  Then the phantasm goes away.  You're back in the room.  I don't want to make anyone fearful.  Hear what's behind what I say.

Tatatumtum tatum tatadum. There's the light gold of wheat in the sun and the gold of bread made from that wheat.  I have neither.  I'm only talking about them,

as a town in the desert looks up at stars on a clear night.