Your boat slices quietly across the Bosporus.
The half moon is pale in the sky,
though it is not yet dark. Like a faded scar.
Or a birth mark,
the mottled skin below your old lover’s elbow.
The clouds are towering, primordial chimneys.
Along the hills of the coast
the terraced homes of this old city
glow the way stones smoothed by water sometimes glow,
ancient and elemental.
The windows of the homes
flare with stray, late sun,
much like quartz sometimes ignites on the bottom of a clear creek.
You are finishing the book she gave you that first year,
your birthmarked lover.
Its pages are marked in her enthusiastic hand…

You don’t have a language for the beauty in all of this,
the way an old life becomes itself smooth,
the way fragments of it coruscate.
It is a fact that we grow accustomed to splendor.
That its song softens, or dies completely.
We forget the city like misshapen books
precariously stacked by a careless librarian.
We go blind to the alabaster body beside us in the morning,
forearms veined like lapis, the fine primal hairs
just below the belly button. We grow weary of Aya Sofia at dusk.
Or we grow deaf, or its song changes
and we choose not to follow.
Later you will sit in the prickly summer grass
and a strange new body will slink like a sleepy feline,
sprawl like a languorous leaf, edges curled with death.
But it is not you beside her, not exactly.
The old language from the old book becomes new again.
Because the language itself is a vessel,
a fishing boat in the predawn harbor, rocking softly with the falling tide,
a lantern swaying in the cabin
and the silhouette of a man, maybe,
moving about in there,
baiting his lines, setting his tack,
repairing his nets. You are not twenty-four in Philadelphia,
but that life is not gone to you, either. Not entirely.
Smudged words remain, a palimpsest of a life once lived.
You are twenty-seven now. The city is Istanbul.
The girl is unfamiliar but the bottom of her dress
is stained with grass; it trails her when she walks.
She lies in the shade, eyelids closed, capillary latticed.
You like the sinewy lines of her neck,
the little bones of her hands that are like bird‘s feet.
She’s listening to the old American story
of greed and transfiguration, boats beating against the swift,
seductive current of the past.
It’s a story you could teach her a thing or two about…

And then your boat mutters softly ashore,
and the aroma of wet uncut grass rises from somewhere,
reminding you of Philadelphia
and the way her stomach smelled after making love.
You never knew if it was her odor, or yours, or some alchemy between the two.
The dialect of that forgotten city disappears,
and then re-emerges, transfigured,
maybe as light on water, or as the scent of water on grass,
or as the sound of an unfamiliar voice reading a familiar book.
I guess what I want to say
is that the process of language fails at rendering what it means
to be on a ferry
crossing the Bosporus
at dusk
while reading a book that an old lover gave you.
To read that book and to be separate from the man she gave it to.
From the man that loved her.
Language is insufficient to the task
of rendering the person you no longer are.
It cannot capture the sun radiating on the windows of Uskudar
while you try, and almost – but don’t quite –
fail to remember her voice,
her scent,
the way she awoke in the morning – like an aboriginal mouse
suddenly startled into daylight (see: it fails!). What remains
is not her voice, or her scent, or the slow surprise
of her eyes at dawn. Maybe what’s left is a semblance of them,
if you could explain what a semblance of those things would resemble.
Maybe it is like a half moon emerging from the lavender sky
in the hour before dusk.
The way it lingers there like an inchoate blemish,
like a mottled patch of skin just beneath a woman’s elbow.