Istanbul Returns

Galata Tower, towards Sea of Marmara, 9 January 2013

I.

Waiting for the first metro of the morning at the airport, there are a cluster of men beside the closed screen of the entrance. Some hold small backpacks, others shelter flocks of shrink-wrapped suitcases into hollows of the wall. Most have the collars of their winter coats turned up against the chill, and we all sink as deeply as we can into what warmth we have. Once on the metro, we each slip into our own dreams of spring, nodding softly to ourselves, against the windows.

II.

Two men, selam aleykum, sit across from me, aleykum selam. One has a face I imagine I've seen elsewhere in the city, in the plush carpeted basement of a foundation for the promotion of knowledge and culture. He is nearly bald, a broad face, a dark patch upon his forehead from pressing it against the floor during prayer, and puts one broad arm across the shoulders of a younger man newly arrived from Algeria. I catch snatches of their conversation, What is the state of Islam in Algeria? and later, First, you address your nefs, and then you can rectify your ahlak. The man beside me sleeps within his hood.

III.

What strings the city together, I think as I stand on the tramway in the morning darkness, or better, the lines upon which we are strung.

IV.


I try to think of ways to write the cold of the morning, and remember a poem, imperfectly, write in my notebook, Those sundays poem it's kind of joyless but who wouldn't be?

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. 

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house, 

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices? 

––"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden, via poetry foundation

V.

The city will catch itself eventually in the mirror of its waters, but in this dawn, rock salt and ice cake fenders and railings, we move through a city encumbered by its own spray. We are in a world not yet melted, in which our grimy dreams have not yet given way to the glittering day.