sieving out new human destinies.
2.
1968. At the dock, ships arriving from the East
dumped punctured rice bags, mice
and the delirium of the Cultural Revolution.
A couple of men in uniform
cleared out the church
in the middle of the night.
The locals saw the priest in the yard
wearing only his underwear, shivering from the cold.
Their eyes, disillusioned, questioned one another:
“Wasn’t he the one who pardoned our sins?”
Icons burned in front of their eyes,
icons and the holy scriptures.
Witnesses stepped farther back,
as if looking at love letters
nobody dared to claim.
Crosses were plucked from graves. And from each mouth
spilled irreversible promises:
mounds of dirt the rains would smooth down
sooner or later.
Children dragged church bells by the tongue.
(Why didn’t they think of this before?)
Overnight, the dome was demolished, instantly revealing
a myriad of nameless stars that chased the crowd
like flies on a dead horse.
And what could replace Sunday mass now?
Women brought cauldrons into the yard.
Men filled up their pipes; smoke rose
into the air, against gravity’s pull.
Nails in worn-out shoes exposed stigmata
that bled in the wrong places—
a new code of sanctification,
of man, by man.
3.
“Read!”—I was told. Who said that?
Angel Gabriel, or my first-grade teacher
who had dark roots underneath her bleached curls?
Language arrived fragmentary
split in syllables, spasmodic
like code in times of war.
“Continue where your classmate left off!”
A long sentence tied us to one another
without connotation as if inside an idiom.
Someone would get to read the noun, another the verb,
a third one a pronoun …
I always got the exclamation mark at the end—
a mere grimace, a small curse.
A tall cast-iron stove below the portrait of the dictator,
puffing smoke from its temples, enough heat for everyone.
On the blackboard,
leftover diphthongs from yesterday or the day before
rubbed against one another like kittens.
After dusk, I looked for another language outside the window,
my eyes glued to a constellation
(they call these types “dreamers”)
my discovery possibly a journey into the past,
toward a galaxy already dead, nonexistent,
the kind of news that needs millions of years
to reach me.
“Read!”—the angel shook me for a third time
her finger pointing to an arbitrary word
a million light years apart from its object. (It didn’t matter who was first.)
Negative space sketched my onomatopoeic profile
of body and shadow in an accidental encounter.
4.
Language is erosive.
It makes us recluses,
a wind through the canyons
carving our paleontological eras
for everyone to read.
Under the revised testament of my skin
bellows a gold-cast bull, an alluring object,
a need for attention.
Then comes the unleavened bread and a last supper,
which, remarkably, is repeated several times
between ice ages.
Lower yet, Sodom.
I recognize it from the stench of sulfur.
I hold my nose. Freud would have done the same.
And then Cain,
a crow taught him how to bury his own brother …
And at the bottom,
Adam’s gentlemanlike sin
under which scientists
discover earlier epochs of famine.
Between unidentified layers,
wanderings in the sand, the search for a new prophet …
I try to understand my people.
Their language is plain. Some words
were actually never uttered, like pages stuck together
in a book fresh off the press
and long after it sits on a shelf.
This, too, lives inside me
within insidious bubbles of air, negative
spaces where I can find little historical rest,
but also where utter ruin may originate.
5.
Little left of the snow three days ago.
Its blanket ripped away, exposing
dog shit and the bruises of routine.
Negative space gives form to the woods
and to the mad woman—a silhouette
of the goddess Athena
wearing a pair of flip-flops,
an owl on her shoulder.
It’s minus zero. The factory’s gate gnashes its teeth
behind the back of the last worker. Blowing noses, shivering, mucus …
A virus circulates through the workplace,
secretly, intimately touching one person after another,
a current of sensuality.
It softens the tone.
But nothing unites them more than their frailty,
the one-size-fits-all shoes you must grow accustomed to
by filling the extra space with cotton,
or curling your ill-fitting toes.
6.
In Halil’s yard,
rules were sacrilege.
His eight children entertained themselves
by carrying famine on their shoulders,
recalling St. Bartholomew’s flayed skin.
Starving, filthy, hazel-eyed—
three qualities that unexpectedly coalesce
in the bright light, strung together like sneezes.
One’s famine was another’s consolation.
“Look at them! It’s a sin for us to complain.
They’re worse off than us!”
But even Halil found his own consolation
in the old woman Zyra, “barren and paralyzed,”
the root origin of despair.
This was our highlands landscape,
hierarchical, where each family
would make out a different expiration date
on the roof below their own.
Schadenfreude was the only river
that could turn mills.
But if this hierarchy shifted,
and our roof gave signs of ruin,
my mother would plant tulips in the garden,
white tulips, our false image,
a scarecrow to keep predators away.
7.
Nearly nothing was mentioned in the letters he sent from prison,
just two lines, on top of the page:
“I am well …” and “If you can,
please send me a pair of woolen socks.”
From them, I learned to read between the lines:
negative spaces, the unsaid, gestures,
insomnia that like a hat’s shadow
fails to shade your chin and ears.
And in the photographs’ white background,
acrophobia adds to the color of their eyes: blue,
green, gray, and ultimately, chestnut brown,
as, earthward, we lower our gaze.
I learned to read the empty spaces the dead left
behind—a pair of folded glasses
after the reading’s done and discourse commences.
Or the musical-chairs game called “love,”
where there are less empty seats than people.
If you don’t want to be the last one standing
you must predict when the music will stop.
(Who, though, has really succeeded?)
Perhaps a little practice can be useful in this case.
I don’t mean squatting, jumping, stretching,
but listening to the same music every day from the start,
the same miserable vinyl record
so that you’ll recognize its cracks
before it recognizes yours.
8.
Midnight. Snoring,
meaningless sounds that stain the side of the wall
that belongs to no one.
So where are we? What dimension?
Who foots the bill at a time like this
without lambs or sinners,
when even angels record nothing?
The street’s clearly visible
under the neon 24-hour-service sign
above the funeral home.
There was a music shop next to it
that closed down a few months ago;
the shop shared a wall with the funeral home,
shared the same water pipes and the same gate to heaven.
But the coffins won,
the wide-shouldered coffins that narrow down
in the shape of a mummy, not a human.
Wood of the highest quality, swears the owner,
and pure silk inside, pleated like a stomach
that can digest even a bulldozer.
When asleep we’re simply five limbs. Starfish.
If you cut one limb, it will grow back.
Even a single limb could re-create us from the beginning,
a single hope.
Negative space is always fertile.
9.
No one knows if it was simply a matter of mixed genes
or some other reason why I used to see
what I wasn’t supposed to see—
the ending of things.
It wasn’t a mystical gift, but like a blood clot
in the darkness of a vein, I held on to reason,
as it circulated from the bottom up
and not the other way around as we were told.
I used to start from the edges
and with my left hand or a croupier’s stick
gather the balls and dice from the corners
and then watch the bettors
as neither a winner nor a loser.
There’s nothing sillier
than watching a film in reverse
where after the climax the protagonists
are replaced by circumstances,
and circumstances replaced by minor characters,
their tongues plastered behind a single, fatal smirk.
Life and my short lunar calendar slipped away
like carbon paper sending off as much light as necessary,
skipping the details, the contrast and sharp colors.
Lunar time is short. Until the actual end,
there are years enough, the negative spaces.
What to do with them when the verb
has already been uttered, a conclusive sentence
with Latin syntax, or more than that:
didactic.
MINE, YOURS
One of the few things my mother saved was a doll.
It was the same height as my six-year-old self,
with the same gray-colored eyes, brown hair,
the same fear of the dark
and drawn to it.
“Don’t touch her!” I was told.
“I have nothing else to sell if we go broke!”
Until the day I secretly stole her
and broke her heel on accident.
It was worth nothing now. No capital.
And then it became mine.
I met you one day in May—
pure blue sky with sparse white clouds on the horizon
and nothing more, as if tiny drawings on a cookie box
made to look tasty to angels and not humans.
What could I do to own such a day
except give it a hard kick in the heel?
For Achilles, the heel would be meaningless
if he hadn’t had to choose between glory and a happy life.
Happiness is anonymous, a face without features.
It belongs to no one. But glory, yes. Even to this day
he drags it behind him—his one and only divine defect.
And the motherland? If there weren’t a cracked pane
of glass between us, an ethereal wound, an undeniable
physical reality no matter the side that bleeds,
I would doubt such a place even exists.
We do everything we can to own life—
“my life,” “your life”—
when in fact, the opposite happens.
Life needs more than a heel to fasten you to itself;
it hits you hard on the neck
and splits you in two, with no time for wonder.
So one day, you find yourself
exhibited in two separate museums at once.
At this very moment, I cannot be sure
which part of me is speaking to you
and which part the docent’s
commenting on and pointing to.
THE END OF SUMMER
The summer is coming to an end.
I don’t mean the emptied swimming pools,
nor the wind digging in the sand
for carcasses, like a coyote pup.
I am referring to another summer
and other signs.
The moment you feel your star cooling off
and so you pull it out of your chest
and stitch it on your jacket like a badge,
or on the collar of your coat
so that others may finally notice it.
The moment you learn how to negotiate—
five desserts for a single cigarette,
five years of life for a failed romance,
five butterfly lives for five caterpillar days in a cocoon—
you understand
that bitterness is the key to existence.
And when you notice the landscape of your mother’s face
and your father’s gestures are repeated perfectly in you
without a single alternative, like a city settling into routine
after the decorations from a euphoric celebration are taken down.
What happened to that which once made us unique?
Unknown hands slip
promotional pamphlets under the door
with offers of end-of-season clothes.
Summer’s stock.
And under the pillow at night,
other hands secretly slip incentives
priced at 50% off that half of our pride
will continue to turn down
for a little while longer …
VIA POLITICA
I grew up in a big house
where weakness and expressions of joy
deserved punishment.
And I was raised on the via politica
with the grease of yesterday’s glories,
a thick grease collected under arctic skies.
I was lit up. My notebooks, my hair, my heart reeked of smoke.
That’s when we saw each other clearly.
Or rather, what remained of us.
Damaged like lottery numbers
scratched away with a blade.
How different we were!
Those with round faces were righteous;
those with narrow faces were cautious.
One listened secretly to Puccini,
another to silence, the music’s music.
The oldest one declaimed monologues
inside a ten-by-ten-foot cell
he had built for himself.
And the mysterious ones
simply had diabetes.
But how similar we were in severe circumstances!
Alarm
ed like a flock of magpies
that the smallest stone sends into the sky
toward the mouth of the abyss.
Then it became obvious there wasn’t enough space for everyone.
We separated. Some went on living via verbum,
telling of what they knew, what they witnessed,
and so, through their narrative,
creating their own grease.
The others crossed over the ocean.
And those in particular who went farthest away
never speak of their annoying history
of wretched survival, burying it
in the darkest crevices of their being.
Unfortunately, as with perfume, its scent
lingers there for much, much longer.
THE DEAL
Nothing ever stays the same.
The acacia and fig tree chopped down.
Under the shade of the fig leaves,
a baby Buddha used to soothe his stomach,
not his mind.
The furniture’s gone. So are the letters from prison.
The double-pleated jacket was the last to be thrown out,
the one with dozens of buttons, reeking of naphthalene,
a relic of the ’40s.
The same dose of estrogen
has smoothed burdens from people’s faces,
and the balcony that had been hit by a cannonball
has now grown a double chin.
In the evening, the imam calls to prayer.
This, too, never happened before. Back then,
people used instinct when choosing
between good and evil, heaven and hell,
if they existed.
“I’ve come to write,” I explain.
“Is that so? And what do you speak of in your writing?”
asks my uncle, skeptically.
He’s able to distinguish between “speak” and “write,”
between a psalm and a sigh.
His voice blends with the one from the TV,
like a heart that beats with the rhythm of a pacemaker
implanted on the other side of the chest.
Only my eyes haven’t aged, the eyes of witness,
useless now that peace has been dealt.
IN THE TOWN OF APPLES
The shadow of a pregnant woman—
a soft row of hills in mid-June.
For several months,
she kept her pregnancy hidden,
the same way the children of the exodus
hid their favorite toys
among woolen sweaters and loaves of bread
when told to take only the clothes on their backs.
A gypsy and his little boy
arrive from nowhere
and stop at her feet.
Negative Space Page 2