My knees, more reliably than anything,
remind me that it has been over a year.

The city’s hills, far more than just seven,
sing an aria of pain each morning.

Every morning I recall what a lover once told me:
I hated pain until I realized that it was only
a different language. Your body telling you
something was wrong. That you needed to change.

We were watching a lightning storm from bed.
On certain days now, my heart, my knees, my liver,
all have their own language.
It was Michelangelo who said,

Whoever is born arrives at death through time’s
swift passage; and the sun leaves nothing alive.
Like Ali Smith, I prefer Milosz, who wrote, out of reluctant matter
What can be gathered? Nothing, beauty at best.

And so cherry blossoms must suffice for us.
And chrysanthemums and the full moon.
To this I would add pain, which is its own
kind of sustenance, and also a kind of time.

 

~

Every three weeks, I stand in front of a crowd
of people - strangers, friends, sometimes old lovers -
and I read. About my father, about Lucia,
about Philadelphia. Pain and sustenance.

More than most of us, you have your own voice,
your style, one of my friends tells me.
That voice, however, isn’t so much mine
as it is my father’s, Lucia’s, Philadelphia’s,

Catherine’s and Ali’s, my brother’s and mother’s,
Genevieve’s and Linda’s and Hannah’s, Joe’s and Ben’s.
You have co-opted my voice, Lucia wrote me.
Well of course I have. This is love, isn’t it?

This is life, isn’t it? We take the voices of our lovers
and our cities, and they become the symphony
that we think of to be ourselves.
We are nothing more than the echoes

of those we’ve loved most.

~

I accumulate voices, then, as I destroy my knees.
Every run through Istanbul is like a kind of
free verse poem. The young boys who sprint
after me for fifty meters or so, calling out

abbi, abbi. The businessmen puffing on cigarettes
waiting for the dolmus who wish me a good run.
The cab drivers standing with the stray dogs
in the blue light before dawn.

Halfway up the hill to Kurtulus, there is a lilac bush,
its spindly body growing from rubble. It seemed
a miracle the first time I smelled it. I remembered
hiding behind the lilacs in Valparaiso, the sweltering

afternoon when I broke the old riding mower
by driving it over the sewer. Or spring mornings
just before dawn in Swarthmore. Cigarette smoke
on my clothes and in my hair and lingering on

 

my tongue. Atop the hill, an old man pokes his head
from the teahouse and talks quietly to a stray cat
while it eats from the palm of his hand. A woman
pokes her head from the balcony where she

hangs laundry. Yabanci, she shouts, yabanci,
ev geliyor. Foreigner, foreigner, go home. Go home.
To where? I shout in English.
Then she smiles and waves and blows me a kiss.
There are schoolgirls who try to hug me,

schoolboys swinging fists. Istanbul requires dexterity.
Jump off the sidewalk to avoid the covered woman carrying
a bag of dripping flesh from the butcher, tiptoe between
the curb and the onrushing garbage truck,

duck beneath the child’s fist, slide past
the girls with their outstretched arms, weave
between the stalls selling oranges, the truck packed
with squawking chickens, the cart stacked with eggs,

their occasional broken yolks littering the street
like landmines or like the dead mosquitoes on my wall.
Usually I finish above cemetery hill, the Halic lit
from beneath as if containing a thousand sinking ships.

I’m surrounded by bones, I think.
No, the adhan reminds me. I’m surrounded by voices,
inundated by them,
lit from within.

~

The road that has led me to this city begins
with a stone fence and a mulberry tree.
I was a gardener then, and for two weeks every May,
during mulberry season, me and my co-workers

would eat lunch on a stone fence in the shade of
this tree. Then we would climb into it, picking
the berries until our fingers were stained mauve.
One afternoon, while climbing in the tree,

a new co-worker - a boy whose name and face
have vanished in my memory - asked me what I did.
I told him I wrote poetry, because I did back then.
You should read Jack Gilbert, he said. Do you know him?

It was the first, and only day, I worked with this boy.
But we picked mulberries together, and later
I would read Jack Gilbert, and later still I would
come home from a family vacation a day early

and meet a girl on a pizza delivery and because the
kids she was babysitting gave her the wrong address,
she would have my phone number, and when she
texted me and we met up for coffee, I was reading

Jack Gilbert. Read me a poem, she asked, and I did.
Now that poem hangs on my wall in my room, beside
the dead mosquitoes, written in her handwriting.
In truth, the road here begins much earlier.

But to tell that story would require a novel
or a life and all I have here is a poem.

~

A typical Istanbul night could go something like this.
Walking down the hill to your apartment
with the three girls from Madrid - two of whom
are the daughters of your father’s college roommate

(the meeting was not planned; this was simply
a moment of Istanbul serendipity) - a group of
street kids start chucking rocks at you. Not small rocks,
but softball sized hunks of concrete.

You make a truce with them. A cigarette apiece
in exchange for their rocks. Have a group
hug. And then after the girls pass and you think you’re
safely on your way, the little fuckers

start whizzing boulders of concrete by your heads,
rocks so big they drag the air past your ear. Then
dinner atop a hidden rooftop café, raki and seafood
and fireworks in the distance, somewhere near Edirnekapi,

where you can climb atop the city walls, the skyscrapers
in Sisli raining light, the endless shimmering homes
galloping in every direction, sliced occasionally
by the black veins of the Bosporus and Halic.

Can you ever really be by yourself? the youngest
daughter asks, the one who reminds you so much of Lucia.
What does that even fucking mean? To be happy by yourself?
The party across the room sends their leftover birthday cake over.

More drinks at another terrace, conversation that floods
and ebbs into the vicinity of dawn. Or here’s another night.
You meander down some hidden passage until the
flower boys guide you up the right staircase.

There are two doors, and behind one is an old man
in a wife beater, sipping soup, and behind the other
is a group of young writers drinking shitty wine
straight from the bottle and a famous Turkish novelist

who has Jon Cohen’s glasses (as he reads, you remember
sitting on Jon’s front porch drinking Coors Light
and listening to the wind as a storm moved in;
or you remember sitting at Eulogy on 2^nd Street,

Lucia and Molly holding hands against the window
in their sun dresses and Jon saying, Don’t move. You two
look so beautiful right now. I want to remember this).
Then you remember New Year’s Eve at Eulogy, with your

high school boys, or you remember sitting there with Logan,
visiting from Indiana, drinking until neither one of you
can even coherently speak. All this while the novelist
reads something about a helicopter and a gun fight.

It was Murakami who said, Memories warm you up
from the inside. But they also tear you apart.
You remember that you and the girls picked blueberries
on the fourth of July. That you walked down a creek barefoot.

No matter how much suffering you went through,
you never wanted to let go of those memories. That’s
Murakami, too. The Turkish Jon Cohen won’t shut up,
which is a mistake the real Jon Cohen would never make.

The lovely Danish girl, skin flushed with wine, makes
a face at you from across the room. Merve whispers
something and then laughs and the Turkish Jon Cohen
scowls at her.

Later, you meet a friend in a garden for beer and shots.
You’ll get dinner at a place where they chop sheep’s intestines
like cheesesteaks on a grill and where they drop mussels
into vats of steaming, piss-colored oil.

These are two kinds of Istanbul nights.

~

There are moments when the city becomes insufferable.
For instance, there was the night coming home from work
when all the trains stopped running and Istiklal
turned into a throbbing madhouse and the tear gas

rained down from every direction and the cops pushed me
back into it, even though I told them I was coming home
from work, even though I had my briefcase and was wearing
a tie. The cop shrugged as he pushed me, the others shrugged

as they pointed their guns at me and I raised my hands
in submission. Or during July when I’m caught
on one of the old city buses with no air conditioning
and none of the men have worn deodorant.

When the crowds come from every direction, and press
down on me. When a Syrian girl dressed in rags
slips on a curb and falls into traffic. When
a gypsy wedding down the hill lasts until four

in the morning, their drums pounding, the women
shrieking something like a battle cry.
But they are just moments.
Because a waiter will wash out my eyes for me.

Or an old man will offer me half of his sandwich.
Or someone will lift the fallen child up into
their arms and carry them to their mother.
The gypsy drummers invite me to dance with them.

Istanbul, a cabbie says, is the city for people God
has abandoned. My friend Baris tells me that Istanbul is like
an abusive lover that you can’t leave because she’s
so dynamite in bed. Istanbul is like man himself,

in Christian mythology. Fallen into sin and redeemed
through suffering. Half my friends, it seems,
have come here because a lover left them.
Me included, of course.

~

My old apartment was built upon what was once
an immense cemetery. A city of the dead. There are
still remnants of that city scattered around the hotels and
boutiques and fast food joints that have long blighted

this concrete swath of hillside. They are the tombstones fallen
outside of the small mosque squeezed between a McDonald’s
and Starbucks, or the fountain across the street from the new
Hilton Hotel, which rises like a skeleton from the earth.

Someday, my time here will be built over and mostly buried.
but the remnants will sometimes surprise me, artifacts
discovered between the newer edifices. The summer afternoons
spent catching mussels in the weedy sea. The mornings

sitting with my eyes closed in Fatih mosque, listening to
the old men read the Qur’an aloud. The breakfast
Genevieve and I ate looking out over the island, the
sky and sea both pewter, the sprawl of Istanbul unending.

A friend wrote me the other week. She’s gone back to Prague.
She wrote that Istanbul already feels like a blur of headlights
on a rainy day - too muddled to make sense of. This, she wrote,
is how my memory works. It means that I exist more in the present,

but I lose so much. The stuff that stands out must really matter,
I figure. What I remember about her is that on our last night
in the city, we lay in her bed and talked. I don’t remember much
of the conversation, but I remember how it felt.

Like water, flowing.
As dawn’s first light filtered into her bedroom with the call to prayer,
she turned to me and we kissed and it was one of those
things that surprises you with its weight, like having the air

sucked out of you. Sometimes you find things like this, just
as you sometimes find old headstones outside a McDonald’s.
We’d talked non-stop for five hours. But then we lay there,
foreheads together, dawn slipping over us, stunned into silence.

~

My first time coming into the city, I came on a road from the south.
I knew nothing of the city’s geography then,
not where its heart was, not even where the continents split.
It was, to me, a formless, nameless mass. All of it

simply Istanbul. I know some of the names now, though
not many. I know that the bus took me from Usukudar,
crossed the Bosporus into Ortakoy,
and then passed through Besiktas, Kabatas, before crossing

the Golden Horn into Fatih, leaving me in Aksaray. These names
are, of course, defined and marked by memories.
Playing football in the shadow of a fig tree in Usukudar.
Eating figs for breakfast with Nurdan in Kabatas.

Walking with one hundred thousand people down the hill
into Besiktas. Aroha looking at me, wordless, in
the shadow of the Ortakoy bridge. A city is nothing more
than a map of where our heart has loved and tried to love

and failed to love. Updike once wrote that we can recognize
the gaits of those we love from more than five hundred
meters away, even if we can’t see their faces. I remembered this
one afternoon as I walked down the hill from Taksim to

Kabatas, past the fallen gravestones, past the apartment
where Linda and I shared coffee in the morning while she
dried her hair and I tied my tie, and saw a woman, a good
two hundreds meters ahead of me and knew immediately

that it was Cemile. When I caught up to her, she looked at me
disapprovingly, as she always looks at me, which makes me
laugh. Her name, she once told me, means beautiful in Turkish.
One afternoon not long after this, I was walking

in Fatih. It was market day, the vendors calling out the prices
in millions of lira, which they do for the old women. One of them
sold mulberries, and I ate them greedily as I ascended the hill
with painful knees, my mouth, my fingers, turning the color

of spilled ink. Cemile, I thought. A beautiful mess.

~

To be in the present means being haunted
by the shadows roads you have not chosen,
Those that lead to imaginary lives in imaginary cities
like Buenos Aires and Paris and San Juan del Sur.

It means coming to terms with the wrecked vehicles
on the road you have chosen, the lovers who have
abandoned you and those you have failed in fits
of cowardice and selfishness.

It means accepting that I have chosen strange places
over living near my family, fleeting pleasure
over the long pursuit of steady, equitable love.
The great fire over the long smoulder.

To be by yourself is, in fact, impossible.

But you can sit alone in your room
with all the voices you have lost, teasing them out
the way a spider teases out silk, trying to
make a web from those voices, hoping that

in it, you might ensnare something resembling
forgiveness or meaning. But all it actually catches
are cups of coffee while a woman dries her hair,
or fresh tomatoes eaten while, distantly,

the grey city refuses to end, or conversations
on a rooftop café that dissemble and lose their shape
by morning. And for a few weeks every spring,
it captures mulberries, and they stain your fingers like ink.

It was Whitman, I think, who got it right.
We are not portraits; we are songs.
But we are not songs of ourselves, we
are the melodies of others,

the fragments that still echo inside us long after
the love burns out, when we’re surrounded
by nothing but bones and the scent of lilac, by moonlight
shimmering on the surface of the dark sea.
 

*With credit to David Berman and his poem, 'Self Portrait at 28'