Sidney Wade
History Lessons
I
History I
In broadest terms, a record of past events.
in material form. Neat and grave. Has patterns,
threads, and consequence. Fairly often dry,
neglecting to address the slattern
particulars that plump the cushions—
a hand, a splendid thigh, perhaps; a passion
that may render choices few and injudicious;
a fine regard for the furniture of the senses.
Museum Pieces
A complex arrangement of artifacts:
in the faux-nomad flat on the floor
above the street of little shops lie
a brass tray, the remains of a meal, door
keys, a notebook. A woman and a man
gauge the spaces between them. An ottoman
formality. And on the walls and windows, kilims hang,
intransitive, textured, and abstract.
History II
It cannot be touched. Can be revised.
We see and re-see. Extending the carnal pleasure.
To what end? Behold the whole translated to the floor.
The funk of Eden. The peck of dirt. The measure
of one’s weight in wool. God is good, we tell ourselves,
and take a post-lapsarian breath. Across a continental shelf,
we think, the old world winters in the dark.
The new one is a wild surmise.
II A Little Romance
The beauty of the yayla is severe.
High, golden light embalms the rocky ground
and chaps the childrens’ cheeks an ardent red.
Sheep and goats graze the face of the mountain.
Evening brings Venus fringed in ice
and stars that cruise the empty paradise
of falling bodies. All seems ancient,
foreordained, and sere.
The courtship was swift—an evening walk
among high rocks in the yoruk yayla,
when their borders dissolved.
Nomad tents smoking below them, the silence
of high and sliding places. A justified line
on the burning horizon. An old and dignified design.
A goat was slaughtered in their honor.
"He who roams" is the meaning of yoruk.
They were tall and perfect strangers.
A Roman road unwound beneath their feet.
An oddly woven composition—
how did these bodies, so foreign and discrete,
navigate their isolations to this pass?
What gravity compelled this mass
to stand with that in utter, tense astonishment
on the forehead of an old, eroding mountain range?
III Ikonium
Konya
After the flood sent Phrygia by Zeus,
in which every living being punished,
Athena and Prometheus bent to the soil
and fashioned small ikons from the earth’s damp flesh.
In their hands grew the figures of women and soldiers
which the great ones, turning, threw over their shoulders.
Touching the earth, this tissue sprang up: a shining
new race the gods prayed might grow fair, strong, and pious.
Catal Huyuk: After the First Dig
What’s left are pits eroded by the weather,
dry gashes in a corner of the mound.
The scars of entry fret a tiny portion
of the whole, the rest lies bristling underground,
a latent, full-term inhumation. Walls
of flesh-toned, fissured earth remain. Imperial
desire, the tissue of fertility,
is often all one has to trade with death.
Hands
The walls of the shrines are stained with the conversation
of mortals and their gods. Many painted hands
with stylized fingers—long and flat
and red or black or white—in slanted
columns signify across the plaster,
to pacify a goddess? ward off disaster?
These hands seem to milk the hard-breasted slabs
for the hard-gotten substance of generation.
IV Kilim
the kilim is a high plateau of patterned light and dry terrain
that dreams of ambling herd of sheep
the kilim is the smoke dung-fire
that watches the night as it turns in its sleep
the kilim cradles children and it dignifies the dead
the kilim repeats itself in red
and fingered passages and translates what has been
into entanglements of line and hatching, urge and frame
Parmakli means "fingered,"—the song of the hand—
an old pattern in kilims—looks like a comb—
four long, slender fingers—his fingers are long—
they string through the warp, bind the rug off the loom—
combing the fringe—hands tangled in lines—as though in her hair—
they are on each others’ hands everywhere—
she watches him kneel, his head bent to the work—
the work of these lines, this rhythm to be scanned.
Magic Carpet
Ahmet and I were out of town one day, buying
kilims from the weavers in the hills. While we were gone,
the town had barred the roads into the city
with massive traffic bumps. Our day had been long,
and it was late, I was speeding, we were high.
We hit a bump, the truck itself sailed up into the sky.
"What are doing, Mehmet abi?" Ahmet asked me from the floor—
"We are flying, Ahmet abi, we are flying!"
V The Burial of the Dead
The universal mother is also
the common grave.
—Lucretius
Insects punctuate the floral patterns in the panels
on the walls. They inflect the plaster fields and flourish
in the conjugations of their painted cells. Winged and wingless
larval shapes, invested in the rituals that nourish
generation, they might be early angels,
handling the grammars of carnal exchange.
Behind it all, the Mother Goddess, humming to herself.
The people of Catal Huyuk are settled, yet still marginal,
refining the semantics of agriculture,
midwives to their Goddess through the force of lines—
in rows of crops, in strips of paint, in the rule of patterned fabric.
In the sacred order of the forms that decorate their shrines,
the violence of childbirth is translated to a fertile
stillness at the center of concentric circles.
When death transforms the living, the corpse is carried
to a platform where the flesh is stripped by vultures
and cleaned further by small hordes of buzzing guests.
The skeletons are now prepared to chaperone
the living, transplanted into frames beneath their beds.
The canvas of this culture is made of reverence for bones
and tissue, the vulture and the vulva fixed in black and red upon their walls.
The teeth of a fox and a weasel's skull
are framed in arcane honor on the altar,
where they protrude from the open nipples of a pair of sculpted breasts.
VI
Walking through the city in decorum.
Not touching, though the air is taut between them.
The moral of this story is unclear.
The imperatives are old, the consequences often grim.
His hands fit, once, around her hips behind the walls.
They took great pleasure in their quiet extramural.
A joint is missing from his index finger,
lost years ago in a pressing form.
*
Desire thrives on tangents. This they understand:
Both our worlds unhanded us—*
the frigidities of marital mathematics
addressed their oddly asymptotic axes
to a bouldered plain below the stars,
to astronomies of sleeplessness, to boulevards
of sheep and goats meandering the Taurine range,
to the perimeters of bedding in a blackly tented land.
*
Eros through the windows of a bus:
A public handshake, peck of cheek. She settles
in the plush seat, rearranges baggage at her feet.
Her seat-mate, sweet-faced and fat, sweating
in the heat beneath her scarf, taps her on the hand
and points to where he stands, spanned
by the frame of departure, his eyes intense and splendid
with their history, entranceway to what already was.
(*"Homage to Mistress Bradstreet," John Berryman)
From Istanbul/Istanbul'dan, Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, Istanbul, 1998.