I.


She is all seriousness.
I call it experience, she says, her back against my headboard.
Black panties and a white tank top, bare legs, toes
curled like drying, dying leaves.

-

Her eyes are the Bosporous on the really clear,
windy days. When the boys strip to their skivvies
and dive from the piers.

The light so fierce it penetrates to the bottom,
illuminating the seaweed that wimples like turquoise,
Like rivered stone.

The boys diving for mussels, indifferent to the garbage,
the froth, the stagnant pools of spume. Their underwear
clinging to their undeveloped genitals.

We watch from the café, the wind doing to her hair
approximately what the sea does to the seaweed.
Liquid obsidian.

-

She is Sultanahmet at night, and from a distance.
Its minarets like a spider splayed on its back.
The windows open to the sea.

-

On the ferry to the island the boys dance to the gypsy music.
There’s no room on the boat.
We’re dangling off the edges, we’re piled on the life boats.
But we make room for the boys, and they dance.

On the island, horse manure and hydrangeas. Fresh mussels
grilled over fire. And far off, Istanbul,
like a computer’s dream, occupying the whole horizon.
It doesn’t end, she says, opening her arms.

-

Sometimes she laughs and
it’s like catching the last ferry home at night.
Coming down the steps to where the engines
thrum and throb, and being surprised
by how bright the moon light is on the onyx sea.

-

I’ve never seen a city,
she says,
that twinkles like Istanbul.

-

In the morning she showers and I make coffee.
Then we sit at my window and share a cigarette, her in a towel,
me in my shirt and tie. I make her laugh. There is nothing in this world
like getting her to laugh. Soon she’ll go back to her village.
Her life will attenuate. But once you’ve felt this kind of size,
once it has opened you, it’s impossible to close.

-

She tells me stories, lying against my headboard,
smoke curling to the ceiling. About playing piano
as a girl, and her mother’s disapproval. About
nights wandering Istanbul.

We are on our bellies
in my bed. Sharing a cigarette. Sharing childhood pain
But mostly laughing.



II.


She is the contradictions.

The offal soup eaten on the street where the trannies
hang out of windows, fanning themselves in the
sweltering stale heat, while across the way
the men from the orchestra loosen their bow ties,
look skyward, and pray;

the night spent dancing, with wine,
and twelve hours later in the mosque on Flower Street
where the wind comes through like grace.
Saying the Lord’s prayer. The spasms of lust
and the synchronicity of prostration;

the Iftar in the 8th floor penthouse –
spicy Uzbek rice, lentil soup, spinach pastries –
and down below the gypsy slums, the
saxophone dancers;

the girl who performed her ablutions
in the Starbucks bathroom
is now the woman
who fingers herself in there.

-

She is that windy day in August,
after all the still, silent days.
When the wind sings in the poplars and
the planes,
and the light is so clean
I think I am still in Wisconsin.

She stands like a sapling in the wind,
braced, afraid of being uprooted again.

-

I see her the way I see her city:
with the eyes of a twelve year old boy from a small town in Indiana.
She is the veiled beauty:
Hagia Sophia at the end of a cobbled alleyway.
The bridge shrouded in morning fog.
The ferries in the hour before dusk,
when the Bosporous is like quicksilver.
Smoke and steel and sun.

-

You’re not a bastard, she says,
shaking quietly. Her body is so skinny.
Her neck is so fine. Her loveliness is like a deer
startled in the middle of the night,
its eyes caught in the headlights,
molten with fear.

You’re just nice. Too nice.

Well, I say, I’m a Midwesterner.

A snotty laugh.

-

She takes me to restaurants that are cut from people’s homes.
Where you eat in someone’s kitchen, wash your hands
in their bathroom.

She takes me to cafes built along quiet canals
where the fishermen bring their boats home in the gloam,
motors puttering like babies on the crowded buses in July
when the AC has died and the windows won’t open,
hulls like mosaics of chipped paint and barnacles.

The small boats come and go,
the men whispering of Michelangelo.

-

We watch the women washing their feet in the fountain,
laughing and singing.
It’s an old folk song, she says, from the Black Sea.
My father used to sing it on road trips. I felt
so safe with him driving us, singing to himself.

I love their elegance, she motions to the women,
their bare feet, their scarves curdling in the wind.
I love the way they’re so proud to be Muslim.
A smile like a small bird taking to flight.
I was like that once.

-

I think about her as we pass through the villages of Anatolia,
me and the farmers in the cab, their boys and dogs in the back.
The villages with tea gardens beneath enormous plane trees
where men play backgammon and smoke cigarettes, day after
day, year after year. Dusty villages where men with skin
like cured olives dolorously push carts bearing heaps of fish
whose scales glimmer in the sun like opals. Villages
where mountains of melons are sold outside gutted stone homes.
I look for her here, her etymology. But all I recognize are a set of eyes
peering out from the cool dark of a second story window.

-

She walks towards me in a sun dress on a full summer day.
How lovely her hair is in the wind. The same black as a
burqa. But my how it moves.

-

Are you still in love with her? This ghost you always write about?

Very much so.

The tears are onto her neck, the frail bones of her chest.

I’ve never felt that before. Love that aches. Love that guts you.

You will, I want to say. You will.

I wish you didn’t suffer like this. I wish I weren’t going to suffer like this.

It’s worth it in the end. Everything is worth it in the end. The pain is only beauty’s shadow.

I remember the first time a man saw my hair. His face. I’ll never forget his face.

But you will.



III.


She is a furtive garden courtyard after midnight.
The neighbors hanging laundry, the sounds of a late dinner –
silverware on plates, the sonorous din of a television.
The couple five stories up that argues – broken glass – and
later makes up. Every night. The neighbors who dangle over
their balconies and converse quietly.

Out on the street, music and traffic.

She takes off her shirt but won’t let me kiss her.
So we lay there instead, listening to the cats bicker,
the birds announcing dawn,
the azhan serenading us while I absently
rub her small nipples.

-

Sometimes, on the way home from work,
I buy flowers from the gypsies at the port.
The women sit there, fat and boiled in the sun,
behind a fragrant parapet of roses and hyacinths
and lilies. The shoe shine men watching them warily.

I bring them home – the flowers, not the gypsies –
and I give them to her in beer bottles
while she cooks Bolognese sauce in her underwear.

-

My first week here, back when it was winter
(there are no springs or falls here, she tells me,
It is winter, winter, summer, summer)
I came upon a cock fight in the middle of the road.
It was an old street, down the hill from Kasimpaşa,
the wooden Ottoman homes falling apart in unique ways –
one withering, one tumbling forward, one imploding.

A group of boys and old men, their front teeth rotted from sucking
on sugar cubes, formed a circle around two regal birds
who pranced and strutted as they slowly picked the flesh
off the other. Blood on the street, great parabolas of it.

My last time down the street
the government had begun their
redevelopment plans.
The homes had been bulldozed.
Heavy machinery belched.

The blood was still there,
the color of her skin.

-

We met in the canyon of banging pots and pans
on the first night of street fires and tear gas.

The shop keepers pulled me into their stores
and flushed my eyes with milk and lemon juice,
gave me a beer and a cigarette.

The noise lasted until dawn, the singing,
the percussion of everyday instruments –
spoon on pot, knife on kettle.

What I remember of those feverish days –
when armed battalions marched down our street
and men in masks waded through clouds of gas;
when vendors sold goggles and lemons
and students brought the protestors çay, coffee;
when the Kurds formed dance circles in the streets
and old women in burqas wrapped themselves in Turkish flags,
the shock of red against their black –
is the sight of the gas canisters arcing beautifully
across a painfully blue sky, their skins gleaming in the sun,
the mass of people suddenly moving as one,
like animals frightened for their lives.

-

We make love for hours, windows open, the mosquitoes coming in.
Sweat like you wouldn’t believe.
Sweat like water, salt on her chest.
Lying afterwards in our mess of fluids. She runs a finger
through the puddle in my clavicle.
What was that? she asks, composing herself.
Where did that come from?

-

She is the neighborhoods, their fragments. The old men sitting shirtless on their couches.
The woman who plays violin every night in her kitchen,
that shadow music. The young girls who have tea parties with the
three-legged cats. The boys who sit with the men outside the mechanic’s shop,
clothes oil stained. The gypsies who are ancient as stone
and mutter up and down the hill, shilling their trinkets.
The Mongolians who brawl in the night, their Neolithic
skulls cracking on the pavement. The old woman
who dumps water on my head when I feed the stray cats.
The babies held in windowsills, the women who stare longingly
out to the street, weathered hands dangling cigarettes,
and the baskets they send down in the morning
to collect fruit, bread, milk. The boys who play football
at three in the morning and call out to me,
Justin abi, Justin abi! Başka bir kadın?

-

In the shower, she sprays me with cold water
when I least expect it. She lifts my arms above my head
and scrubs me meticulously. Laughs, and laughs.
The emptiness that she tells me about
in the darkness before sleep
has lifted for a moment or two.
I feel like your mother, she complains,
suds in my hair. She bites my lip, wet hair matted to her
forehead. Pulls me in close. Rests her chin on my neck.
Holds me. This unexpected tenderness. What is its root?
Death, I suppose. Fear.
But we are naked in the shower. Drunk. Keeping her
roommates awake with our laughter, scampering naked
down the halls, our wet footprints on the hardwood.
Three months ago I did not know she existed. Did not
know she was moving through this city, watching the beauty
around her and not feeling a thing. This won’t last, she and I.
But for now, I bring her flowers from the gypsies. We lie in her bed
and read poetry. We are easy together. And it is so tenuous.

-

She is of light.

-

You have tutkulu, she tells me.

What?

We are in the garden. She is rubbing the soles
of my feet, I am playing with her toes. My parents used to do this,
in the years when things were improving.

When you make love to me. You do it with tutkulu.
It means with fervor. With fever. You do it like
you’ve lost something and you’re trying to get it back.

-

We go dancing at a roof top terrace.
A jazz band, playing American blues. Her hair is up
and she’s wearing glasses, a pencil skirt.
She moves in a way I can’t describe. Like liquid, I guess,
like she was born for this music, this bar,
this city. The men watching her. Me watching her.
The satisfaction of them watching.
Into the night we dance, the two of us, sweating through our clothes.

Later she will stop me in bed.
What is this? What happened?
Where did your tutkulu go?

-

She is the city at night from the Bosporous bridge,
windows down so the brine air comes gasping in.
Hagia Sofia and Sultanahmet as they have been for centuries.
The endless lights ascending and tumbling over the hillsides.
This city of smoke and spice, of sweat and sea. On the bridge at night.
The easy silence of something resembling love. Both with our absences,
our hollows, our basic human emptiness.

I worry it is an illusion, she tells me some other night.
This fever.

We are on the bridge. Istanbul twinkles. We are headed home.
Summer is coming to an end.

-

She is breakfast running out the door, hurried, a messy kiss
on the landing. No, no, she says, wait. Pulls me back,
half way out the door. One more. Kisses me again.
Hands me a fresh fig, takes a bite of her own. The juice
on her chin. Teeth the color of the city at dusk.

Things vanish, without reason or warning.
Sometimes they come back.
And sometimes you’re left groping for them blindly.
Like waking up in free fall.