Carl Boon
Spaces
This girl every evening
while watching the soaps
polishes her nails
gray or crimson-chrome.
She is good, a dome
of sweetness surrounds her,
and for her husband she
makes mushroom soup
and waits for him
and sometimes
if she glances at the window
the stars speak to her.
They say virtue is mundane
and we are sorry
for the flaws, the frayed
curtain, the spaces
between you and him,
but what can we do? We
don’t startle and shift.
They do not say
scent the bedsheets lavender,
be silent as the hills
turn black. Most evenings
they say nothing at all.
And if by chance a man
strides down Suçluluk St.
with a briefcase and a rose,
she rearranges her hours
as some rearrange silver.
What matters is
to keep intact those spaces,
to find their comforts
and cling to them as children
cling to chocolate, songs
they’ve memorized,
old anthems of perhaps.
You can see them
in the schoolyard
keeping rhythm.
Or someday make a book
in which the spaces break,
the stars command,
the man pauses, twists
beneath a burned-out
streetlight, controlling
his rose as if it were a wand
to put the world on a pin,
flinging his briefcase
in an angry release.
Istanbul Life
Fast, like a scandal,
like an addict's fingers
in the morning in need.
They tell me this is how
my flesh must move.
If there is thinking,
it must be done before,
the way the hawk surveys
its landscape of prey
in winter, the way
an athlete knows
the outcome before
the outcome. Hail that cab,
be greedy for space
and minutes of comfort.
You might miss the thing
that can't be missed:
the subway seat,
the pretty girl's eyes
tracking you, the ferry
to Üsküdar, where inside
the Harbor Mosque
it's 1653, figs
arrayed on platters
and men peering
through cracked walls,
imagining Anatolia
and sunflowers.
Üsküdar's a fine place
for falling in love.
My folks back in Ohio,
where the spaces dividing
day and night are wide,
where the corn this May
grows, cannot know.
