oh man it’s good to hear your voice
now in the country we both were
born in but still have yet to see
each other in I want to tell you
all about it how it’s changed all
the newfangled gadgets the shifted
mores but all we want to talk about
is the old country that wasn’t ours
you want to tell me how hard
repatriation is and I want to tell
you how a bus driver’s quotidian
how’s it going has irked me for years
you complain about how far the shops
are how you have to walk through
bereft suburban streets a forlorn
pedestrian burdened with groceries
waiting for a gap to cross the busy road
longing for the old bakery downstairs
but remember oh wait we can’t go there
we’re in the wrong fucking country
then remember how the baker griped
of being summoned to the airport
to rally for the president remember
the sonic booms you told your daughter
was just the omnipresent construction
remember thinking how could she go
to school here when each time you walked
past the school it was silent turned into
a prison for the many who didn’t know
they were now dissidents and terrorists
we laugh about the cats that killed
the power during that election reminisce
about that old crush of mine and who
she’s going out with these days trying
to tell the difference in this old home
that feels like exile between hüzün
and gam and keder and plain old üzgün
I tell you how even though here the damp
nights smell of petrichor and dryer exhaust
once I saw a scene repeated everywhere
down the block from Miko’s Ice in a far
off city there was a girl leaning on the hood
of a car parked in summer heat being wooed
in vain by the neighborhood’s prettiest boy
the world is not text even when all
you can do is read even if the land–
scape’s become all chessboard
the clouds aren’t pages turning
wheat doesn’t sway dithyrambically
on dactylic stalks the foghorn’s maudlin
note means nothing at all to the air
that carries it the tide knows no couplets
those fireflies I once saw mixed with
cornfields like the Milky Way in no
way made constellations the cervine
rabbits who leap and stare the migratory
buoys roosting on the lake during
the season of lenient fasts and minor
feasts don’t mean that winter’s
on its way any more than the locust
leaves meant to silt the gutters up
any more than because the squirrel
thinks itself a wily hunter it is one
frogs have been around a lot longer
than the gods and their voices only
speak to each other but still like
a garroted agitator up in a garret
a calm cascade of questions undoes
such easy certainties and if you say
it’s time since I should perhaps it is
concede me then but a single thing
at once both immediate and far
we all know that Adam didn’t give
his rib for Eve that’s why he has no
baculum but maybe he keeps coming
to her to get it back although of course
we know that aut futue aut pugnemus
is a false dichotomy like the notion
that justice obtains when all is fair
yet happiness is when I’ve got it
better than you at least somewhat
the same way we can’t be sure we see
in darkness the same street as a lover
who has slipped out undetected into night
we know that sometimes the aspergillum
will be a whisk flinging water like a lash
and at other times a bottle with neck
so slender it would make rain appear
to be in essence an invisible rose
in Istanbul again I go to an ex’s for
dinner for the first time in many years
and I’d forgotten her smell is just
as I remember for the first time
I meet her daughter and we play
while she busies herself in the kitchen
I tease her with impossible questions
and she keeps answering with sanki
sanki meaning I suppose as if as though
she could have been my own daughter
this child smaller and more serious
than her years could have been the father
who held and comforted and marveled
at her courage at the needles at the chemicals
at the surgeries that left her with too few
ribs could have been that helpmeet
we ate karni yarık for dinner split-belly
then wound through her bedtime routine
to stay up for a few hours of chatting
over tea with her husband and in the end
as I went out once again into the night
I too loved him as though he were
a light I could never have born