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from the Turkish of Erozcelick Seyhan (1962–2011)

Coffee Readings 1

People stand on one another’s shoulders and soon are a tower stretching into the sky.

At the summit, a single hand silver as a flying fish.

But none of us is last. All of us are first, as we rise like incense through the sky, people who become a plume of smoke.

Or, more like a rainbow, or the roads of a rainbow, its open roads to emptiness.

Surely this smoke now makes a saint, a smoke-saint who is a smoke-man or smoke-woman too, all of us writing our stories on the sky, like the grits in the coffee cup spinning around.

Coffee Readings 2

These grounds are dry. Time must have stopped.

But inside the cup, what might be a mountain is flying into the sky. Simply a symbol? Of anxiety perhaps? Because when mountains fly they leave the world behind.

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