The mind is an ocean. . .and so many worlds
Are rolling there, mysterious, dimly seen!
And our bodies? Our body is a cup, floating
On the ocean; soon it will fill, and sink. . .
Not even one bubble will show where it went down.

The spirit is so near that you can’t see it!
But reach for it. . .Don’t be a jar
Full of water, whose rim is always dry.
Don’t be the rider who gallops all night
And never sees the horse that is beneath him.

translated by Robert Bly

For those who truly love God and His ways
All the people of the world are brothers and sisters.

translated by Talat S. Halman

I just finished watching Opening Night on DVD again after having not seen it since it opened in LA sometime around Christmas in 1977.

1977.  LA.  Another lifetime ago.

That would be the first Christmas season at Intellectuals & Liars with Jimmy, Gordon, & Joel, before Randy joined us, or Bill.  What did we sell then: the literature, the poetry: the small press editions like Black Sparrow copies of Charles Bukowski or Mulch Press books of Paul Blackburn, novels by Joan Didion, Thomas Hardy, Hemingway, E.M. Forster, Tom McGuane, Don DeLillo, Robert Coover, Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara.  Barely 1000 feet of selling space divided into 2 rooms, those reminder tables in the back with hardcover copies of Scandinavian plays for $1.98 and the hardcover copy I kept of Sunflower Splendor, 3000 years of Chinese poetry, which I have here in Istanbul and periodically still lose myself…

Each day the gold sun comes over the hill.
The woods are beautiful, also the dark animals,
Also man; hunter or farmer.

The fish rises with a red body in the green pond.
Under the arch of heaven
The fisherman travels smoothly in his blue skiff.

The grain, the cluster of grapes, ripen slowly.
When the still day comes to an end,
Both evil and good have been prepared.

When the night has come,
Easily the pilgrim lifts his heavy eyelids;
The sun breaks from gloomy ravines.

translated by Robert Bly

we learned not to eat pizza
in restaurants run by Vietnamese
and buying by the slice
was the best
at that one place with the hot young guys
they called you lovely lady
and you were, are
charming them all
even me, still
as you separated the ham
from the carbonara sauce
and slid your plate over
and like me
relished spaghetti with black ink sauce
I drank white wine for you
old friend
and I hope you appreciate the sacrifice
but it was worth it
to have your company
once again

Sunday today.
Today they took me out in the sun for the first time.
And I just stood there, struck the first time in my life
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .by how far away the sky is,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .how blue
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .and how wide.
Then I respectfully sat down on the earth.
I leaned back against the wall.
For a moment no trap to fall into,
no struggle, no freedom, no wife.
Only earth, sun, and me. . .
I am happy.

translated by Randy Blasing & Mutlu Konuk

4

I painted you on canvas only once
but picture you a thousand times a day.
Amazingly, your image there will last:
canvas has a longer life than I. . .

5

I can’t kiss or make love to your image,
but there in my city you’re flesh and blood,
and your red mouth, the honey I’m denied, your big eyes, really are,
and your surrender like rebel waters, your whiteness I can’t even touch. . .

translated by Randy Blasing & Mutlu Konuk

Tonight my hand
. . . . . . .can’t read or write.
It’s neither loving nor unloving. . .
It’s the tongue of a leopard at a spring,
. . . . . . . . . .a grape leaf,
. . . . . . . . . . . .a wolf’s paw.
To move, breathe, eat, drink.
My hand is like a seed
. . . . . . . . .splitting open underground.
Neither a song of the heart nor “common sense,”
neither loving nor unloving,
my hand on my wife’s flesh
. . . . . . . . .is the hand of the first man.
Like a root that finds water underground,
it says to me:
“To eat, drink, cold, hot, struggle, smell, color–
not to live in order to die
but to die to live. . .”

And now
as red female hair…