POEMS

Arrival
Call to Prayer

 

You Know How Devastated I Am in Love
(from a balcony in Istanbul)

Dogs rub their bony bodies
against the crumbling
brick building
opposite my balcony.

Across the yard,
bed sheets
cover windows —
behind them, women veiled,
men thinly clothed.

Early evening Sunday,
a boy sings
in the street
below. Proud,
off key
and alone
in the light
of a bare
yellow
bulb.

Outside my window,
leaves drop.
Wind blows the smell
of rotted wood, wet
garbage, coal
and burning
incense into my room.

A wish.
To pause selfishly
above your forehead,
pale as the ghost
of first love,

the exquisite
dark opening
of your
mouth
at the tips,
of my fingers the slow,
arc of your breath,
the sweet death
of time

But I sit in this room
on a strange bed,
the ticking heartbeat
of a wooden clock
next to me—

how devastated I become
in the early
morning darkness.
The moon wasting away,
above a steamboat ferry
in a harbor,
by the sea,
at the mouth of the Bosphorus.
The great Marmara sea

 

Arrival

Four in the morning ride to our hotel. Four jet-lagged women in a Turkish taxi, sleep and sing; ask the driver about kids and family, talk of dangerous roads, diesel fuel, and count stars against a coal soot sky. The driver laughs a wicked laugh, his eyes more narrow in the rearview mirror. As I begin to wonder just where we're being taken, our wheels hit the curb in front of The 'Otel Obelisk. A money exchange. Too little sleep, too many zeros. Four confused women cackle outside a swiftly departing Turkish taxi. We have arrived.

Inside the lobby we stare wide-eyed. Embroidered rugs the color of wheat, of rubies and coffee, stretch wide across slick marble floors. Copper, silver and brass teapots. Serving trays and bowls, lie like museum pieces, dimly lit on shelves behind glass. We take our keys and talk loudly. We grab each other's luggage by mistake. The man at the front desk with obsidian eyes stares as I stagger with my bags into our room and the waking night.

On the bed, mounds of colored scarves spill from an overstuffed suitcase. My roommate's silhouette in the bathroom light; head tilted, hip cocked, her hands filled with jars of European creams. Crystals, stones and rosewater for blessing are set on night tables as makeshift altars. We stand naked and laughing as we oil our skin with rosemary and birch. The moon; a single pearl hung in the sky, but nothing so numinous as these morning prayers; the sounds of Moslem chants begin to overlap and rumble through loudspeakers outside.

I widen the curtain and see the faces of women I know, peeking from their rooms across the courtyard. Shadows drape their skin. I open the window. Prayers echo through streets, through alleys, into our rooms, into our naked bodies. I hang my head out the window and open my mouth. I want to be the air they rush through. I want to taste Istanbul as it moves through me, to reach out my hand as if I might touch a lover's face. "Will you, Istanbul, be the one to teach me of love again?" My belly hums with the voices of men in minarets who sing to a sleeping city; ghostly echoes of men in minarets singing —

Late into the morning, I lie drifting in bed. The echoes of traffic now below in the street; the blaring of horns, the rising voices of taxi drivers and passengers being driven past—soon I'll leave for the mosque. No museums, no shops. Let me kneel in prayer, hands folded at my chest. Let me kneel in your chipped stone mosque, alone, as chants rise from the cracks of rocks broken. Against my mouth, a kiss of sweet clove, ash and sage.

 

Call to Prayer

To the top of a mountain I climb.
The white hot of the noon sun
over green fields, shepherds flocks
and the rubble of collapsed buildings.
Below, the holy rush to prayer.
Honking horns and Moslem chants.
Gravel dust from tourist buses,
cattle grazing under a powder blue sky,
anchored in blood-rust dirt.

Cliffs shoot jagged steps
that lead to the ruins of a temple.
On the ground, a (stone) body fractured,
its face etched in granite,
smoothed quiet by hot winds.

To the top of a mountain I climb to become a spiral of singing chant.
A sound low and rumbling and old as dust.
Let me become this whirl of sound,
carried by the call that floats endless
through the sky, as voices fall,
like a dreamt haze clearing.
Let me be the sound of rolling voices
through fields of weeds and flowers,
Let me be pulled into the earth
and raised like Lazarus —
a song for the waking dead.

 

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