Sunday, July 30, 2006

Don't talk to me about Matisse

Don't talk to me about Matisse,
or Dickens, or your beloved Shostakovich

talk to me instead
of bombs that bear notes from little girls,
that splatter into thousand pieces
when they hit targets named
Aisha or Ali.

Idea for a Novel

An undercover agent sits recuperating in a Sarıyer home, observing the goings on in an ordinary Turkish family, with all its talk of relatives and marriages and newly bought houses. (and even TV series) He is the estranged friend of the daughter of the house, who seems to be settling in nicely after her years abroad. After the observations of the spy (Russia? Middleeast?), through flashbacks we get the story of the daughter of the house, who's recently (?) married and lost her lover, all unbeknownst to her family.

Friday, July 28, 2006

Shahrur

I got Paul's Shahrur book for Zehra and now am loath to give it to her. It is written with such clear Arabic, it even tempts me... if only I had time I could get the Üsküdar girls together and we could have our own tafsir class.

Istiklal Street has changed so much- yet again- it almost looks like Kalverstraat, or maybe like Bodrum now, the white of the buildings pronounced due to the evening lights. At the end of the street we bumped into a Greek classmate of Paul's, who reminded me so much of Zacharoula... I'm building up a yet another very dangerous national streotype; but the constellation was so similar there was no escaping it. Me, the public school boy and the Greek girl :-)

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

and now zur Sache

I, once again, realize that form is everything
Everything (this is after reading a German article)

as Paul Muldoon once pointed out, "It knows"- even when you think you do not know where your writing is going, if you have form, it will take you to the place- maybe not where you want to go, but where it is worth going

is there some inherent advocacy of ritual here, from a pious person who follows certain rituals?

Saturday, July 22, 2006

instead of a dagger in your stomach

this is how it could be

he talks.
you see a white washed living room with sparse furniture
you see him stroking a cat
you see him look for a word in the puzzle

the kitchen materializes out of nowhere,
with the yellow tables and what you see
dangling from the window is some
village craft you picked up in Kenya

instead of a dagger in your stomach,
this is what can happen
when a man talks,
and it's a beautiful evening
in a third-world, hilled city

and in your mind's eye
you still reach out for that drawer
to hand that other person
the knife.

power talk

where the talk is about Hureyre and Ayşe and women slaves

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

home

back in Istanbul with my domestic feuds with mom, this house is teetering on the edge of collapse...
40 years' worth of memorabilia, each as unthrow-away-able as my TLS issues from 2001, or my 97 Berkeley guide to England, so consider the green dress she wore on that picnic in 1978....
I have to make space for Jean Rhys once again in my room, push the Arabic dictionary to the side, the Morocco guide to the left, and possibly throw away the Goldhagen book (but the sweet memory of my huge black bag as my new porsche and sweet m had noticed and i had turned away the head) and whenever shall I start reading Spencer again? Throw away Langland perhaps? The Marlowe volume looks decorative so that'll have to remain. And the books never returned to Irem... now I wonder what she'd think of my German

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

war rhetoric

all these miles you laid
leading to your beloved people

I'm going to turn them into rubble,
and it shall catch you
oh so unawares
for you had not reckoned,
you had not calculated-with-it
that a subaltern could

and to think
that a word placed here
another ommitted there
would have saved your roads
your monuments, and castles
you had built, oh so carefully
and with fervour
never taking time out
never enjoying the joys of spring
or the lethargy of the summer

but as I push this war machine
towards your battlements
I still fear I'm walking
on the miles that I helped you lay.

Monday, July 17, 2006

row row row your boat

and we shall never (more?) go arowing
by the light of the moon

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Once More Unto the Breach (Isaac attacks Ishmael once again)

Waiting for the
monsoon with my
excommunicated Indian friend
in this dry, arid land
where -when it takes its fancy- the river runs green
or blue, according to season
and where
people hop on bicycles
to go wandering
to go singing songs
by the campfire

...
the monsoon
has been
threatening for days now
and we sat muted,
dehydrated
severed from
our bottles of bottled water

in
a little piece of India

she points a finger
to all injustice that has been done
in the past
and accuses the world
of being silent

It thunders.

Soon we'll have the rain

Exorcism

It took no priest to do it.

One Sunday morning, it came slowly
from where the castle stands in the West,
first bringing joy

I was happily singing at the table
not knowing

but then it started to work its way:
first the blood drew from my hands, and then my face
I could feel every nerve and fibre
sighing
as it
oozed out
with one, final convulsion

Now a slight drowsiness remains,
letting dementia,
a baptism of forgetting
to
settle in.

Monday, July 10, 2006

Schubert commemorated

die Post bringt keinen Brief für dich
was draengst du denn so wunderlich?

March 2006

Oxford

Stoned,
and with a bottle in his hand
he staggers to the busstop
to ask me if I have been waiting for long.

He knows we're headed the same way
from the (college) scarf I am wearing, he says
when prompted.

Hurling his body -almost emaciated
that particular, concave look,
the hair almost Suede- to the seat next to mine,
he takes out a Livy
from some place within his crumpled trousers
and starts to read

sweetly oblivious,
in equal part
to London, the world
and what may chance in between.

Sunday, July 09, 2006

Flanders

Flanders, oh Flanders
who would've known, or guessed
that you'd be
an afterthought
or even an aftermath
to some incident called
Leuven

a bloody and nervous tick
connected to rape fields
and sheep that won't fit into a rhyme
(and the knee, the knee)

Flanders, oh Flanders
you shall reap
the benefit of fallen soldiers
and women
'the poppies in the underwear'

Flanders, oh Flanders
you have resurrected the dead today
and I shall
abide-by-the-past
conquest and expulsions.

The proverbial continent in flesh

Two Lives

I have been reading Two Lives by Vikram Seth, and just as expected it fits my mood perfectly, and reminds me I have to ask Basil about his grandmother in England.
...The Law Concerning the Overcrowding of German Universities...
Good company while I do this translation, which also has its purposes, it trivializes the whole satanic verses episode, and makes it possible for me to read the Rushdie book.

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Bismillah

Look to the East for a change, my cousin said
I did not deign or dare
but she did
and came back with
stories
I dare not share