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Distance is created either by space
or the slowness of movement as one can move thirty-one
years back in time by
visiting my Turkey.
Kadikoy, a ten-minute ferry boat ride from Istanbul, a continental shift, Europe to Asia,
A crowd.
Fishermen on the wharf, keeping the
fish fresh by sprinkling them with sea water, next to
peeled cucumbers.
But these can't be the same fish stale alive in my memory!
Now, thirty-one years later, in the
falling dark, the ferry now, not a pleasure craft, but a
commuter boat,
Carrying tired grim people sailing from work,
And I, the prodigal son returning,
Not to the embrace of his brethren, but to those for whom he is a stranger,
Alien in the alien corn,
A tourist...
When the space traveler returns,
having travelled at the speed of, spun, puns, he'll find
himself/herself much
younger and unable to filter through the
membrane of weird,
float
old/new words,
Meanwhile, down on the slop ranch,
pig ranch, cow range, slow-as-snail plough ranch,
words have stripped off,
shuffled off, brushed off, stripped off, kicked off, put in the
closet their
angelic natures, wings of
paradisiac aphrodisiacs, but are slow witted
(even airs
retarded) gamins, sad ruthless Monte artists, addicts, soiled fifth columnists...
I can feel the cool breeze of Kadikoy's secluded square,
unbent
Nowhere.
Change, in a chain: time bends space bends light, bent in water...
Words chain. Change.
Nostalgic hope, you dope, rope.
After 31 Years A Bookstore Under
A Huge Tent In Kadikoy
Intermingled bulbs, shaking in the breeze, hanging from a rope all across the tent.
That rope has been an irritating
resistance, a ghastly, ghostly double exposure, streak of
light.
Faces, political posters,
intermingled with bulbs, shaking, stretching on a rope inside the
tent.
Wind and choral music blaring, the flaps pulling back on all sides, the sea breeze...
I begin browsing along the sides of the tent,
stop in front of racks of political postcards,
with drawings of a grieving mother and hungry child
or a photograph of a
black man or a marching group with flags.
Suddenly, somebody steps to my left
very near behind me. He is the secret police
checking out a new face.
I pick a few postcards, leave them
with the owner at the counter, ask him if the music
playing is the radio or a
tape, he says a tape, I ask if he has it for sale, he checks, but says
no, but
he has others by the same composer,
ask him to give me all and ask him if he
recommends others and to put them
aside, then I go on to browse further.
The Secret Sex Life in
Galata,
Caning In The Ottoman Schools,
The Charms Of The Chador,
Ottoman Bathhouses for Lady
Dowagers,
The Art of Secret Communication
With Signals,
Womanizing In The Winter Snow,
The Methods Of Avoiding Police
Raids,
The Varieties Of Supporting A
Mistress
The Rules And The Lingo Of
Street Compliments In The Ottoman Period.
I bought also Eleni Fourtouni's, Women Hanged in the Greek Civil War,
with the cover photograph of two
women hanging from branches of an oak tree, necks
broken, arms and legs
dangling, with a third figure, in the back, merging with the black
oak tree,
only the lighter rope visible.
***
In this veil of tears
Air heavy.
Salty
In the eyes.
Sweat falling from the forehead
When working the fields.
As I carry her,
The arms, unknowingly, caressing the water,
Just if she were not dead, but heavily drunk with water,
Last hope, like last of city lights, last window, the last kind face
Blowing out.