Not unlike Provence, this sheen off a sea,
wakes jagged furrows ferries gouge into
a warped metal sheet whose irridescence
showers blind spots among protein floaters,
so radiant the glare. Or the graveyard
at Aşiyan Asri, a real Père Lachaise,
its luminaires, among them poets
I shall never read, mouldering under slabs
whose script needs parsing to comprehend.
Here at Bešiktaš my gaze falls upon
the gauzy film this raki, arak, ouzo sloughs off
spilling over crisp facets of ice,
billowing veils within a cylinder,
in whose cloud can be divined
not diaphanous future but past murk.
Suppose raki had flowed before pastis,
my Bosphorus before my original Seine,
would I now be aboe to decrypt those tumbling
graven stones, recite those poems?
Would the lives and deaths here
laid bare before me, their hard facts inscribed
as well in minaret, peristyle, dome,
be more transparent? But the world of thyme,
garlic, fig, aubergine, I found it first
the way it was, not how it came to be.