I wake up to thin October light on my legs,
crystalline autumn sky swimming on floor.
The pigeons roosting out my window
converse with my kitten, who shakes
a malicious paw.

My room is finally furnished.
A bare room is the bastion
of a broken or dispassionate heart.
Those incapable of love, or those trying to forget it.
Above my desk are New Yorker covers
from the dead psychologist. Your poems
are by the door, and the flag we stole
from the 12th hole of my golf course (August mist,
faded jean shorts, the moonwhite of your legs)
is above my bed. Everywhere is the red
of my Phillies memorabilia and the smeared blood
from the mosquitoes I’ve killed – which means my blood
is all over my walls.

But it’s morning.
I see none of this.
It’s there, I think, were I to open my eyes
and roll my neck: our possessions
are probably still here while we sleep
and when we blink. Unless they aren’t.
So let’s pretend –
because I’m liking this train of thought –
that I’m in a barren room, or better yet,
no room at all.
My eyes are closed; there is my body
and the infinite primordial nothingness.
But before I design this world anew,
there is you, sitting beneath the palms
and the mangoes, the sun descending over the Pacific,
a wind whispering down out of the mountains
and tickling the stray hairs on the back of your neck.
You’re barefoot.
The sand – which, this far from the sea, is
mixed with sticks and soil and discarded chicken bones –
is cold between your toes. Your sunburn
has teased out the freckles on your cheeks.
The crown of your nose is peeling.

A few surfers are savoring the nearly empty beach,
riding the large swells creating by a storm
half an ocean away. Squalls in French Polynesia
mean cold beer and lingering dusks here. Really,
the waves are just ripples. Mosquito wings.
You’ve seen one of the surfers around town.
Australian, tan. You like the way he looks at you,
as if he’s already seen the two of you together in bed.
There are children out there, too. Your students.
Bright eyed kids who will become bright eyed
fishermen. Someday, they’ll share mango
with your first daughter, when she makes her
pilgrimage here after the first man she loves leaves her.
The pulp like sinew on the cold blade of the knife.

Down the coast are the lights of the beach bars.
The sounds of their rousing
from their afternoon slumber – glass on wood,
muffled samba, clear bursts of laughter. You
look up from your book – what are you reading these days?
Woolf? maybe Gilbert, since you’re far from home? what
about Cortazar? yes, Cortazar; that’s it – and feel
the mountain wind rattling in the big palm leaves. The
Australian looks your way – a stomach like spring music,
hips like arrows of flint – throws up a hand.
You wave.
But before that, you dip your head,
and, here in Istanbul, feeling the ripples,
I open my eyes and I smile.