Sounds and smells
Evocative of a past that
did not happen.
Teasing me with half-remembered
sensations
Which never could have been.
And yet the mind and body know the
Answers to riddles.

The melancholy call of the faceless
muezzin
The wash of ship-made swells on the shore below
A mingled tangle of smells:
Spices, dust, exhaust
And the footfalls of ancient dead.

An amalgam of two thousand years
Recalled one night
On a narrow bed in
A venerable red yali
On the banks of the
moon-cast Bosphorus.

ARW
1977