I GO TO CALIFORNIA
I go to California
to visit my father’s grave, to write a letter.
I am 53. 53 years ago he died
on a Bakersfield highway, the sun
slanting at the Shasta firs,
his body mangled in twists
of concrete and steel, everything
beyond that point of blood
serene. He was 31,
became a man between the wars,
smoked and laughed
and looked beyond Kern County’s
hills in darkness when I became,
when my mother called in joy and fear.
My daughter and I,
having wept, eat prime rib
at Valentien’s on Truxtun Avenue,
though Tex-Mex sounds better, a beer,
a place where my father
dangled his feet and spoke of
baseball, being a father,
running the truck
through the county in the heat.
There were so many strawberries,
lettuce everywhere, fields
of broccoli, beans, apricots strung
like Christmas ornaments in June.
The fields he made made him.
TEACHING ALLEN GINSBERG IN TURKEY
I am stuck.
I don’t know how to frame
in quickly understood
academise getting
“fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists.”
This is a quandary, this, or
“I smoke marijuana every chance I get.”
Do I need
my own exclamation point?
Somehow the whiteboard’s
never white enough for
Hell’s Angels and Tokay and Bickford’s
in the afternoon. Shall I say
“On Neal’s Ashes”
is a metaphor
for the thrill of the road
and the vast American West?
Integrity: meet reality. Nice
to know you. I sit in my office,
counting down the minutes, seconds
until class, wondering if
I should simply hop around the room
and read it out, even the disguised stuff
about the, yes indeed, about the
Columbia University President’s
genitalia. So what happens
is that I spend much time staring
out the window at the gray cat
that comes around, offering
her sympathetic eyes. This, or
I silently lament expression’s loss
and power’s gain,
clutching my red Collected Poems
for the long ride home. Where I will stand
before the mirror in my boxers,
beat and indistinct, unable
to write out my hatred or my love.
ON READING ILHAN BERK
You can feel the skin
of a girl slipping from the bed,
the angles of her goodbye,
her perfume on the sheets.
And then there’s cold,
no poetry, no birds—the slate city
conquering all. You walk
to the window, wish a bit,
hold the brush she held,
weep.
Two painters
in the next apartment
sit for a breakfast of olives and tea.
You are alone. They cackle, laugh,
curse love with every bite.
You search the bed for strands
of hair she might’ve left,
but you know within the dogwoods
she has greater hair
and has forgotten you.
RUINS
The woman on Baghdad St.
going bench to bench
in search of shade,
walnut trees,
Istanbul’s chinars,
can’t remember. Was she told
of her grandfather’s hands,
or did she hold them
one August Friday in 1952
at the funeral of an unknown aunt?
The urge to know this
knocks her back, makes her fragile
in her skin. We carry this need
to know why we are who we are,
why she holds her tea glass
that particular way, why
her grandson sleeps
with the sheet between his legs,
why pauses in conversation
make her think of watercolor
landscapes.
There are picture albums
with dates in the drawer
where she keeps
her mother’s handkerchiefs.
There’s a Quran with slips
of newsprint nobody’s touched
in thirty years. These are meaningful
in ways she’s finding how
to fathom, to stretch stories
from facts, facts
from what’s been whispered
at Ramadan meals:
suicides, debts, Uncle Mehmet’s
Chevrolet that carried him to Kars
and never back again.
Her discovering why will be
a religion, a rhythm
to make her blood
more than blood, her nose
significant.
SUNSET FRAGMENT
The sun takes a long time
going down. I remember
this morning. I was here
with coffee, contemplations
of the news: somebody died.
There is war, the southeast border
is weary with war.
That’s what I thought
this morning, when the sun
was over
there
and not
here. Way over there,
way beyond those hills.
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