After this next poem in, we will have
a moment when you will talk among yourselves
and I will drink a glass of water.
The next poem is the one written apparently in my own voice,
and it is indeed a letter written by me
from a strange place back to home and to someone
I grew up with.
I'm sure you have discovered, as I discovered on this occasion,
that when you travel, it is often in order
to be brought home to yourself.
And on this occasion, and on this travel,
I was reminded of something that had happened to me when
I was very little, and I wish to share it
with the companion of my past.
I had gone to a progressive school in Cleveland, Ohio.
And there had been a time when our class made
a kind of expedition to what was called the Great Lakes
Exhibition or Exposition.
And there was a whole thing about being Vikings that year.
And there is some recollection of that in this poem.
And it came to me rather oddly because the poem
was written in the form of a letter to my old friend Anne
from Beyoglu.
Beyoglu is the European side of the Straits
at Istanbul, where I was in the journey, as you will hear.
The poem is called "From Beyoglu."
"Dear Anne, counting here and now,
I can discover ten boats-- no, no, a dozen boats.
In this light, or lack of it, in this unlikely emptiness of air
that lets me look miles up the Bosporus,
miles down the Marmara to Kadikoy, miles across the Horn
to Uskudar, some dozen boats.
Lighted each one, if not by light revealed,
are set like moving jewels in the water.
Shiftless, still.
Or perhaps it's the sky they're set in,
plying up where further jewels fly from Yesilkoy to Ankara
and all points east.
The last few minutes lost me the horizon.
There's no telling.
Before when there was, say an hour ago at least,
a door in the minaret level with our balcony
opened and out stepped a man in shirt sleeves
cupping both hands around his mouth.
Whereat the air ring with calls to prayer.
Who could believe how loud?
And there are little rings of light bulbs
now just where that muezzin vanished once he'd
bawled the sunset out of sight.
And all the world that is not Turkish--
turquoise-- turns ultramarine.
Every light is a jewel, like the 12 boats.
Even this balcony to them another gem.
Jewels the kind you love, Anne, the kind we
saw in the Seraglio.
Amber drops labeled tears of the latest Phoenix.
Draconites engendered in the colorless brain of serpents.
An amethyst whose liquor at night
thickens to sapphires, which will melt the wax they're
sealed with, even by moonlight.
Cloudy emeralds glistening in a glass
as though slaves had licked them into shape.
Stones, jewels, lights only farther
off these marking sea, sky, and the now invisible promontories.
Atmosphere in Istanbul mimics history changing the sky,
changing the sea, leaching out all local color
from the land leaving the dust and ash.
The moon at noon.
This afternoon, our third, it was a disaster here.
Oh, Anne, my dear, everything here
is a disaster, closed, under restoration, bricked
up, broken, sadly lacking, reconstructed,
brought down, now in disuse, utterly gutted.
Quite ruined, badly weathered, reinforced, past repair,
toppled, razed, formerly vast, slashed, scarred, contaminated,
stripped, stolen, sacked, defaced,
vandalized, once resplendent, damaged by the sultan's death,
interrupted, damaged by earthquake,
lost, burnt, unexcavated, filled in, whereabouts unknown.
And we returned without a word to the hotel, twilight,
and the view.
But at night, these ashes glow.
This dust kindles, like the sultan's topaz,
sallow then suddenly red.
The moon turns Greek fire, catches.
While I watch, I hear the past appear.
The moment the moon rises or the city on its pyre
sinks back to Constantinople and then to Byzantium.
S in the room behind me switches on the radio, full blast
and the music, fierce as that muezzin's, fills the air.
Finlandia.
Dearest Anne, do you remember the year we were Vikings?
Monday after Monday, Miss Peterson
started off with the Silver Songbook, Sibelius,
and oh, land of lakes and azure streams a-flowing.
Sure, Von Karajan conveys it better,
the true Viking from Vienna.
But the truth?
The trouble is I can't tell, Anne.
I can't tell the truth from travesty.
Children shrilling Sibelius in a ring supposing the black Finns
to be their blonde Vikings.
We were those children.
We sang.
We suffered.
We were there.
Where were we?
Wasn't it real?
Is only this real?
This complacent stirring orchestration here and now
and the moon and Istanbul.
Are all those mornings silver singing
gone when you and I were Great Lakes Vikings?
They come upon me, and I am theirs.
Such music summons me to my own devotions imperative
as any howls from the minaret.
How to find a place for the past once it turns on you,
and how to believe in the present play of lights
and placid sea.
My dozen boats have left the harbor basin black,
till one ferry edges out from Galata, from the bridge they
break in two at midnight.
And as it trusts itself to darkness,
my answer comes, nor is it, you would prompt me
from the Songbook as if we ever lacked masters in displacement.
Vladimir, Marcel, there is another world in this one.
The past is in the present or nowhere.
But mostly there, I find in Istanbul, nowhere city,
faint beyond finding.
A site for Baudelaire, hospital, whorehouse, prison, purgatory,
hell, until the moon turns it on with a sound like Sibelius.
Grace beyond argument or need granting the vision.
Unsounded, true Istanbul contains itself
in glory, all trash.
The year we were Vikings is here with the Blue Mosque, a dim
splendor depending on a light, a sound, a memory given,
not gained.
Nothing is left, but nothing leaves.
That is the holy wisdom masquerading
in Turkish delight.
Even Finlandia comes to an end, but with it
comes a kind of solace, Anne, a final comfort.
The Finns are Turks, Mongol types who share a language.
Ural Altaic, characterized by vowel harmony,
agglutinative forms and uniformity,
which sounds like poetry, no?
Even like a poem.
And once we know Sibelius was born in Turku, Finland.
S turns out the light.
Our room ceases to be a jewel.
The ferry from Galata misses Seraglio point.
It is dinner time.
Love, Anne dear, from the European side,
from Beyoglu, where I am.
Richard."