After the long swelter,
a full moon swells in the east.
The old women saunter out their windows,
smoking sleepy cigarettes, taking their small reprieve.
They throw years into these solitary smokes.
Years of quiet desire, abandoned ambition.
Draughts of smoke, cool air.

And now the call to prayer
reverberates from the low, ornamental minarets,
baptizing the heads of the young girls
in the park, sharing a late night picnic. Bread
and heat soft cheese,
cherries so ripe they paint their lips and teeth
and chins. Their scarves wimple in the breeze.

She told me once, during one of our coffees,
that a lot of thought went into a woman’s scarf.
A lot of her personality.
If you pay careful attention,
she told me,
A woman will tell you a lot with her scarf.

Hers was vibrant,
the color of robin’s eggs, or maybe the late August sky
in Northern Wisconsin. My boyhood sky,
a harbinger of dread in such lucid azure.
A beauty that cannot endure.

Those coffees were luminous and adamantine. Lovely
like the sun-hammered surface of the sea in Greece.
Which is to say: the real language was submerged,
written over by formality and manner. She hands me sugar,
crosses her legs. I lean forward on my elbows, or pull out
her chair. She covers the engagement ring with her free hand.
I look away while she adjusts her scarf.

Love as palimpsest, or code.
More goes into our reverential silences, our
measured smiles, the precise number of inches
between us in the elevator, than many couples
endow the act itself, the coupling.

I walk alone into a Pentecost of moon light.
And then, glimpsed down an alley, the water awash,
in a cathedral of light.
The city like an endless glittering galaxy. And it is singing,
singing just for us, me and the old women and the girls
with their cherries. A benediction.

These furtive glances
remind me of a few strands of hair, loosed, fallen on her
brow, the color of overripe corn. She let them hang there
a few minutes while I looked and we sat in silence. And
then she folded them back  beneath
her scarf while I watched.
It was silk and solid black,
like the Bosphorous on a night with no moon.