Translated from the Turkish by Neil P. Doherty

Goat Path

Idly I sat down and listened to the wind
on her way back from Sagittarius
Then onto the utterances of the river I passed.
The night laden with grass
as I strolled by it did not see me.

The road lifted its head
and looked
(lichens and grey weeds)

I am aged water.
Speak to me of the forest’s voice
of the voice of the meadows.

Silence always this silence

Take me up to the goat path
I cannot die here

__

Yesterday I Took to the Mountains, I Wasn’t In.

In my pocket the sun has spawned a cloud. Stone is blind, I wrote. Death has no future, things have only their names. And: “A name is a home” (Who was it that said that?) Yesterday I took to the mountains, I wasn’t in. A cliff looked at us, and what it said has remained in my mind. It is thus we sense what is infinite in itself. Objects are just those that are held in time. Every spring the fleece of Hermes Trismegistus, kindling pedlar to the tailors, would rise up. Rain cannot but rain. Stone cannot but fall.

What was I saying, the world has no thoughts. Grass does not grow bored. The pencil thinks itself a tree and the horizon a hoopoe bird. No matter what you say, the world exists to be turned into myth. And so it can have no other ending. Turning into myth, becoming myth. That is what we call infinity.

Wherever I start from, there is where I return. I am going. To work on death, to polish that grand sentence.

__

Things

I have read all things, the open and talkative gardens,
and attested to the incurableness of words,
of the pencil.
One day I saw an insect changing place
as though
it knew something.

And so I pondered the positions of death,
of the cube, the pyramid and the cylinder.

There is no one thing that is incorrect.

Of all things the best is water.
One evening it told me of the places it had seen.

I left the water and its shade.
It is the finite one should pore over.

Let the trees give it my name