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July

The emperor's moon is an orange smudge. His sky, his heat wave.
    His dust
is everywhere, on the leaves, over the arc lamps. On the doorsteps people
    sit on drinking beer.
They watch a jogger who doesn't belong there. The light turns green, and
    a car just sits and idles.
Someone's looking to get shot, they mutter. A car horn blasts. His dams
    make the river run
backward, make it rise and make it fall. He makes it change its composition,
    makes it pure again.
Runoff and spillage. Flouride, bleach. Islands of coal pushed by tugboats.
He makes glass and iron, and he takes our cancers away.
He digs lakes and lays fields to sustain us. The sweat down our backs
    dries deliciously
in the cool rooms where the file servers keep accounts. He provides us
    with power.
Days that turn like a miller's wheel, nights the air in our lungs. His ashes
are everywhere, in the chambers where gasoline is trapped, compressed,
    and then ignited –
that's the force that drives the rods that make the engines work, in the tips
    of our cigarettes
flicked in the gutters. A car horn blasts. A window goes down. Someone
    yells something
about sleep. Shut up, someone replies. You go to hell. Why don't you
    come here and make me.



Off-Season

What isn't for sale is closed for the winter. The trawlers
slap against the wharf, huddled three deep, and the men
come by to drink and talk, fiddle with their nets awhile,
not one of them under forty. The masts creak in the wind,

and in the forest across the harbor the beech trees creak and break,
quicker than they grow new shoots, quicker than the dunes advance
from their protected enclaves, killing the roots, stripping the bark.
The outer rings dry up one by one, but the rot begins at the center.

On the beach the waves are soldiers from the First World War
running for the enemy's trenches, as if there is no death, only victory,
their soft bodies falling, the hard wind pushing them back.
The survivors retreat, join the others, and attack, regroup, and attack.

Just outside town, the sand-hazard sign flashes yellow.
Most drive on through, leaving their cars pocked with tiny craters.
Others take the detour. The dune grass bows and stands up,
bows and stands up. The Twenty-First Century belongs to Islam.


Three Wishes
   
Would we become immortal?
Would we walk naked through the forests
which had been waiting all these centuries for our return?
Would we grow wings?
What would we do?
What would we do with our past?
Would we make it up to everyone we wronged,
use those second chances we'd been letting slide?
What would we know if we knew the future?
Would we speak the language of streams?
Would we bring the dodo back? The cockatrice? The magestic
    pterodactyls?
What would we say to the Swiss Alps?
Would we still carve sandstone into great cathedrals?
Would we still burn witches?
Would we still have revolutions?
Would we walk around all night to avoid our apartments, my friend?
What would we do about the smog?
What would we do with the Antarctic?
Would we make it bloom?
Would we have perpetual twilight?
I love twilight.
I should like a shot of whiskey, please.
I love winter mornings,
snow falling out of the clear blue.

Click here to read Brad Bostian's review on Alpay Ulku's book, Meteorology.

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