from my first collection, Meteorology
1
All day the birds have been twittering advice from their perches,
the fat one an expert in snow peas, the other a strawberry connoisseur,
strutting around the periphery and flying off again to interview each other
live on location, even the ones from competing trees, finally even the squirrels.
My job is to carry things, and sit on the porch and smoke.
The cat is helping, too. He is lying in the sun with his paws before him
like some Egyptian god, his thoughts warm and fluid, geometrical, alert, watching
you tear the grass by its roots, your fingers deep in the earth so lush
"Jack and the Beanstalk" must have been set here.
If "dark and rich" were a color, what a strange thing having a body would be.
No one would ever be afraid of death again.
If "dark and rich" were a color, "Anne-Marie" would look up from her garden
and two hundred years slip away like a glass of water tipped carelessly on its side.
2
No shadows. Only the heat and its odorless, translucent flowers, and the villa's stark white walls.
Tomato plants, hard and distinct, laid out in little rows like artifacts from an ancient city, their names written neatly below.
As if they would crumble like a clod of earth if you grasped one to snap off a sucker, your fingers crumbling too, then your palm, the back of your hand.
You part your lips and the heat sears your lungs: you don't remember if you spoke, or just thought the words.
You don't remember what you thought: the heat, your lips.
Some place green perhaps, like the virtual meadows you strolled hand in hand with your father through when you were just a girl, barely able to walk,
how one day he was never there again. What a strange thing to have a body.
You suppose you should put some water in it.
You should stand up now with your shirt clinging to your breasts and your face to the small breeze any movement would make,
For a long time you consider the sky, rooted there like white flower, motionless, waiting for wind.
3
A dry leaf tumbles into a puddle and sways at the water's edge
like a galleon boarding provisions, waiting for dusk, for the Ancient World to return.
Like a mother watching that strange light go out in her new born's eyes so she can rest, knowing he's here now.
Ivy twists around and around the day lilies like wolves corralling a herd of wild horses.
They raise their necks in terror and the wolves jump, pulling them down.
The ants swarm from a corner of the garden, blind in their armor, to carry the empire off in fragments for the red Queen's pleasure.
She is dying of borax. A beetle disappears into the same darkness it has always known: the cat slits its eyes and swallows, not from hunger, not for anything.
In the center: tools: what is and what will be marked by stakes and a piece of string: an ashtray flooded with rain water, mosquitoes breeding in it.
When it seems you've forgotten that you asked I tell you
for your Anne Marie-ness, irreducible, for the wake the wind cuts in the grass.
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First published in The Malahat Review
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images and text © by Alpay Ulku
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