En Eski Aşk Şiiri

The Oldest Love Poem (For Susan) Back from Istanbul, she gives to me the photograph she took inside the Archaeological Museum’s blue tiled hush, of a tablet carved in terra cotta from Nippur, written in Sumerian. Delicate etches, a lift of riverbed where the summer waters ran glistened on this piece of earth the earnest working hand, a pause between the lines to contemplate cedars’ ornate overhanging leaf-work become inseparable from the carving.  Maybe reading sky, reading wind, or tree sounds beside the sound of clay shaped to carry a human mark. Maybe it says we are so elegant in our exchange that looking at each other the trees whisper their contented green across any distance to be here branches heat-satiated full in our veins of holding