Translation from the Turkish by Neil P. Doherty

Translations dedicated to John W. Sexton

Dirty August

That too the hard-heavy nothingness of existing
There as daytime stirred
The white organ of scattering: heaps of salt
Like daytime
Lifting nature’s thick shells

Down comes the opposite of a fisherman
Dirty August! Things that drag me from here to there
A few hotels stick in my mind
Or they don’t stick in my mind
But not that the hotel itself
The brown coloured organ of loneliness: a heap of dreams
Made out of brown coloured flames

Nothing else needed, to see nothingness
Dirty August! In the end I set my eyelids on fire too

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Petrol

I’d had enough, there were cats up on the roof,
Men were approaching-a whole lot of men,
Me, Henri, Alain and Bob,
All of us incomplete today,
All incomplete today,

We know Henri, who says we don’t know Henri,
He is our tap, flowing hastily out of Europe,
As for Alain, well he’s our hunger; he knows a lot of women,
Who leave at all hours of the day,
All hours of the day,

I was tired, in the distance there were roses
From the flickering of a rose a new rose emerges
A moon makes a new moon of its entrance into the room
We love Bob so much, because Bob is one of the desperate
Like the dead really, the one quickest to stick in the mind.

It isn’t clear who passed through this lilac
We gathered up a lot of faces from the markets
Me, Henri, Alain and Bob
This is Europe, this place that is sometimes a poem
You, I understand,
But what use is understanding us?

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The Gravitational Carnation

Do you know, bit by bit you live in me
And yet, it’s possible to be lovely with you
Say, we’re drinking rakı, as if a carnation were falling into us
A tree ticking away precisely right next to us,
My mind, my stomach left in tatters.
You lean towards the carnation, so I take it and give it to you, there
You give it to someone else, even better
The other person? He passes it on to the one beside him
And so the carnation goes from hand to hand.
You see we are nurturing a love together
I speak of you, warming up to you, but not just that,
Look just as the seven colours turn white
We are silently becoming one

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Precipice

From the top of a flock of trees
From the top of a many treed flock of trees
The sun falls like slices of lemon
Into my glass of vodka
I feel a joy that is not mine.

I am cutting where we stand right down the middle
Oh appearance! There is something of you I really don’t grasp
Not deep down, but in the veins of my feet,
There is a vast, towering precipice
That restrains there and fritters away there its depths.

Not over time, though in some place
I am growing older with something that is not mine.
Out of my first shape I pass, exhausting
This slowly burning brick yard,
Decked out in crystal chandeliers.

Ah, my stupefied heart

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Shiver

Ship creating its own fog
it slides, glides right under my feet
a harpoon bird flutters its wings
there in the fog
out on the sea, not a trace of time

The wind brings in smells of burnt honey
off the glass on the shore
off the seedling dust

I too am a seed
a seed stirred
abandoning me to myself
there on the shore
out on the sea, not a trace of time

Save the grander time
of the beautiful, of the pure

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