I’m thinking of you now, Sharon,
half a world away, because
sometimes I’d just like to return
home—to go back to my late thirties
where I’m sitting unemployed,
alone in my small room in Austin,
reading your book Hard Country
and feeling the way I did when
I first read “You Leave” and “Forests,”
two poems that opened me up
to my own voice, or did to some extent,
the way Frank O’Hara’s once did.
And because your poems still
contain some of the native spirit
of the country you were exploring
as so many others were then,
when the century had grown old
and, it seemed, lay wide open to
voyages of discovery of other selves
lost among heaps of dry leaves
scattered by eddies in the fall winds,
the still centers of which held
the gold dust of startling realizations
we hoped to claim and exploit
by transforming them into spells
we’d cast someday in our poems.
But then, turning again, I
see myself with this longing,
yet with nothing to which it may
be attached: a gap in the links
of a long chain of memories
that each day reaches farther back
into the dusty stretches of a horizon
in a country I’ve forsaken in favor
of one that has become my home
only by virtue of its having provided
me a vantage point, a new room
in my imagination from which
I can relax and look out at a scene
grown familiar to me now,
born of that old time’s end:
a view that extends endlessly
toward another way I might
once have taken, always beginning
with the same misty expanse of sea
that pulls me along on its inner waves,
from this world back to that other one
of forests and mountain ranges,
the land your poems open up to me,
spread across the brown-tinged
pages that I finally turn from
again, gratefully, and leave.
Istanbul, April 2007
