Alice Melike Ulgezer

  

Alice Melike Ulgezer is an author, poet and sometimes musician. Her first novel, The Memory of Salt is published with Giramondo.
She is inspired by her love of mysticism and the desert and is based in Melbourne where she's working on her second novel. 

Tree Climb

Boasting dexterity of limbs

I climbed higher

through overgrown green shadows

reaching for apples

 - displaced in some mossy Oak Eden –

Feeling your keen eye

Sluice through the light

I turned to face you.

White cotton,

The shade of a panama,

And the conversations of well travelled hands.

Then the assiduous descent;

limb by limb -

without the fruit.

And all this just to reach you

Your chest a cage full of birds,

Your breath on my ear,

As you utter;

Rabbat.

Tel Aviv.

Down From The Mountain

You came before dawn

And sat across from me in the kitchen,

Your hand a distraction of desire.

You told me that we all create our essence,

Then asked me about the man who had fallen in love.

But all I could tell you was, in my end is my beginning.

I didn’t tell you that I have been trying to decipher old stones,

To count the alphabets of hands,

To mix wind with wanting,

Blood with bread, grief with rain

                            Or that seven is green and eleven is most certainly yellow.

I didn’t tell you of the chance semiotics of an unbound silence,

The sugar trace of owls in the heat and dust of the desert,

About the trees of my grandmother's street, or the milk

That dripped from the breast of a spirit woman, to suckle you baby.

I didn’t tell you that nothing compares to the mad laughter of nines,

About making love in the grace of chance crossings,

Of endless, uncreated text.

I didn’t tell you that sometimes

It takes all day to understand what color I am,

That I know you drink wine secretly in the Mosques

And, that I know who you are, an exile in the garden of spirits you don’t believe in, playing dice with the stars.

Or that ever since you told me you would meet me,

I have been here, at this station,

Sitting on my suitcase for the first time,

No longer carrying it around on my head.

And that in waiting some thousand years or so,

I have learnt to sleep here too

And have finally remembered the words of my father,

A revolutionary who could never bring himself to pull the trigger,

He said; “Come down from the mountain,

Leave a hundred seeds for the peacocks

Say your salams to all the prophets

And plant a rose bush over my grave.”

Baby Bird

Listen,

Baby Bird

Hidden in the skirts of the mountain

Outside time counts to ten.

"Why is it that no matter the promises, you still haven't met me,

Here where I have been waiting

Hidden like a ruby in the mountain outside time?

Can you imagine the years it takes, setting out early one endless morning,

To go beyond the birds who didn’t make it

- scattered up the beach all torn ink and feather -

Beyond the gauze of land and beyond the years it takes,

Setting out early one endless morning to reach you?"

The soul of the rock hums the first sex of the earth;

Fistfuls of apparitions, the rapture of resistance,

The bond of salt,

Water remembers light.

Iron hums its favorite old story;

The first sex of minerals, the lust of magnets,

The desperate energy in their clamped coupling,

Cobalt contractions and heat,

Light remembers wings.

Ion hums a tightly bound knuckle of secrets;

The turning hymns of salt and light,

The centre of the soul of the rock,

The first time.

Baby Bird, thirsty for the text of water,

Sharpens her beak on the page of the rock, clears her throat and sings,

"Read the rock for me Ion! Read the rock!"

Ion, in the soul of the rock, humming the secret sex of the earth,

Says that iron remembers the first time,

The years it takes to reach beyond the edge of the blue.

And the hymns of the myth of water,

Her being subject to gravity, her intoxication in the fall,

Her surrender to space as she passes over,

Her endless transmigrations.

The memory of her, says Ion, is Heat

And Heat, says Ion, is the big remembering.

The rock takes nothing, the water passes over.

Water remembers Ion humming in the soul of the rock,

Iron humming in the soul of Baby Bird.

Rock doesn’t have any reason.

Doesn’t want for anything,

Doesn't search for anything.

Baby Bird thirsty for the page of water,

Lowers her beak to the rock and sings,

"Read the rock for me Ion! Read the rock!"

Listen! Can you hear iron humming the secret sex of the earth, of magnets and mercury, copper tin and the keen steel kiss of the memory of heat - of looking up, of moving from tree to tree?

And can you imagine the years it takes, setting out early one endless morning

To go beyond the gauze of land, beyond the birds who didn’t make it-

The rape of an alphabet scattered up the beach all torn ink and feather-

And beyond the years it takes, setting out early one endless morning to reach you?”

"Yes, yes! But read the rock for me Ion! Read the rock!"

Listen! The rock remembers heat in fistfuls of minerals,

Iron cleaves to mud, mud to the intricate clay of the soul,

To the years it takes to reach you or sand to desire, glass to mirrors, mirrors to stones.

Baby Bird, I was all the time alone, travelling in that big remembering.

                

Humming in the iron of the soul of Baby Bird,

Ion remembers water bound tightly as a knuckle of secrets,

Turning in the centre of salt and light.

Baby Bird asks the rock,

"Did you ever write my name on a slip of paper

And slide it under your pillow at night?"

Memory of water in the soul of the rock speaks,

You forgot, that I have been waiting for you,

A hidden-turning in the iron-salt-light of this water,

Of her endless incarnations, listening as she passes over.

Baby Bird lowers her head to the rock,

"To touch you is to remember that language.

To remember is to grind seeds to make color,

Sand to make a mirror, mirror to make a stone.

Ion! Rock of my heart! Listen to the humming of iron in the soul of this water

As it tells itself its favorite old story! As it tells me its favorite old story!"

The sex of the still earth - a hymn in the soul of Ion -

Doesn’t want for anything, doesn’t search for anything.

The rock takes nothing, the water passes over

And listen, Baby Bird, hidden like a ruby

In the mountain outside time

Counts to ten