from my unpublished second collection
1.
I saw a vast ocean on which sailed the fleets of every navy that had ever been. The ocean was still too vast for them. The fleets were specks of color on a canvas that was light and movement. Years and months fell like snowflakes.
The fleets met rarely, and always without warning: a swell would fall and there they’d be, and then they mostly traded. The Pheonians traded with the Spanish Armada, and Soviet submarines surfaced like whales to swap beluga caviar for bootlegged tapes of Frank Sinatra or the Ottoman Empire’s famous rugs.
It was easy to communicate when everyone had the same questions: who are you? do you know what has happened? have you seen land? have you found a way out?
Only once or twice did navies pass each other silent running and the admirals would not stop for tea or schnapps, remnants of the old creation, poor things.
Only once or twice were shots fired, and those shots fell in sea mist, and the men who gave the orders were set adrift on the small boats of their disgrace, rudderless and without provisions.
2.
You showed me your crow’s nest and how to trust my human eyes, and to navigate by stars and sexton, and to smell with my sea nose where we’d been. I learned that solitude is riches.
And when I showed you sonar - that to hear is to see - you stood transfixed, and afterwards played such strange music on your flute your shipmates had to listen and had to admit the beauty of it though many did not want to.
3.
What kind of prison is this, with the windows and the doors wide open? And a map transmitted endlessly, in the ra-ta-tat of rigging in a stiff breeze, in the cry of seagulls at sunset, in the path the moon paves on the waves: live in peace live in peace live in peace live in peace, until we get it right.
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First published in the American Poetry Review and reprinted in Poetry Daily.
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images and text © by Alpay Ulku
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