FINDIKLI PARK

Returning from one of our extravagantly

            gratuitous, necessary errands—a remote suburb

for oatmeal, the canteen rumored to serve

            Atatürk’s favored drink of fermented bulgur

—we’d find them on our building’s doorstep.

            Tightly clasped, lips never quite touching,

like two amorous cubs they’d tenderly maul

            each other’s heads after school as we stepped

around the lovers, half joking about our age,

            the discomforts of heat and a hard stair,

stirring the embers of when my hair was red

            and yours existed. It wasn’t the famous view

we sought in the quay’s open-air café

            where we sipped mint tea at the end

of our workday, breathing in the scent

            of mussels roasting over illicit campfires,

the scent of all the ingenuity demanded

            to reconcile the distant, milky skyline

with its labyrinth of diesel, bone, and gilt.

            It was the old man who still wore the suit

of his former, more expansive self

            selling three shots from an airgun at balloons

sliding around the water’s warm surface

            where they held his breath above the cold, dark

tussle of the countercurrent drowned beneath.

            It was boys cannonballing into the Bosphorus,

watering the old woman’s chador and bucket

            of roses. Unballasted, she’d list through the park

like a decommissioned Dreadnought,

            her flowers regimented in foil, unperfumed,

and indigestibly red. Footsore from years

            trying to reach the end of another day,

she was here to shame us into buying a rose.

            She stood so close I can still taste her air

rubbed with onion, sour tobacco, fennel seeds

            chewed for a little sweetness, all the yeasts

from which her bulk rose before the sun

            to travel to the wholesaler. Her fairytale task:

emptying those acres, emptying the world

            of the very idea of rose. Or strip the word

rose of all meaning, as her roses were stripped

            of their power to wound. She never spoke.

She wouldn’t shift until her open hand

            was answered. In her eyes, no sign

I could see of the girl she’d swallowed.

            Through smoke, iodine, sulphur, the sea

I saw only her age and, in the mylar foil,

            my own face, as you dropped in her hand

your single coin of Turkish—Hayır—No.