The Impossible Glamour of Istanbul
the narrow streets on the hill
leading from the mooring of our ship
were stepped and cobbled, or bricked.
from overhead they must have looked like laces
knitting together masonry walls
which lined those ancient spaces
greenhorn that I was (and am,
in cosmic time at least) under the luck
of many graces I walked, naive
unafraid/unbrave and innocently unstuck,
full of ignorance and contradiction
as any boy who'd not yet had to grieve
with young others like myself I went learning,
laughing up our hill with no prescriptions
caroming off the inner walls of skulls but
singed instead by bonfire embers
scattered in fresh imagination's thrilling burning
we turned and faced the Bosphorus
caught in an opening between close parapets
the air was clear and undefiled for us
the sun as bright as white phosphorus
for us the place was indecipherable and new
impossible and glamorous
a muezzin called his faith from roofs
but no one really knew if god was there
a woman paused to stare at three
unconscious boys in sailor suits
the muezzin's song echoing in the canyons
of those streets was not consonant
but to our fifties four-part
doo-wop ears was clamorous—
like half an argument too resolute,
too apt to drown out other ways of love,
the opposite of amorous avalanching
down the slope of years
to bury new counter-thoughts
that children of the present world
hiking up their hills will
always be advancing
.
by Jim Culleny
11/01/14
—Thanks to Azra Raza for the poem's title and the article
that provoked this recollection